Writing tagged "hardware"
A mysterious drop in Ethernet speed
At some random point in the past few weeks, Ethernet speed on my couch dropped from just under 1 Gbit/s to less than 100 Mbit/s. Besides feeling like I was back in the early 00s, this frustratingly ruined my low latency streaming performance.
Reinventing my rack cooling solution
Most of my computers have been sitting in a noise-insulated 19“ rack for 6 years or so. Although I’ve been administrating real servers for more than a decade, I still get a kick out of cosplaying as sysadmin with machines that I can actually touch, rather than being located in some rented data hundreds of kilometers away.
The rack I bought came with a temperature-controlled fan that pulled air through the whole box (just tall enough to fit under a desk), but could only run at 0% and 100% speed, because the temperature control was just a binary switch. That kinda defeated the point of the rack being noise-insulated, because even Noctua fans make some noise at 100% speed.
Working around a broken SD card slot on a Raspberry Pi
While moving a cable, I violently ripped the SD card out of my Raspberry Pi by accident, breaking some of the slot’s plastic in the process. I was certainly careless, but using flimsy plastic for a component that can receive quite a bit of physical stress is probably not the best idea.
Suspicious disk failures
The disks in my home server have been acting up lately: Two of them (which I bought at once a few years ago) deliver different results when I hash a file multiple times, another just randomly hangs sometimes for a few minutes. The SATA and power cables seemed fine, replacing them had no effect on the problem. So, why not check what wisdom S.M.A.R.T. has to offer?
So I bought one of those fancy South Korean IPS monitors...
Recently, people on the Internet have been talking about (comparatively) cheap 27“ monitors from South Korea with a glorious 2560x1440 resolution. Jeff Atwood and Scott Wasson wrote about it, and summarized their critiques fairly positively.
For something around €300, you can order a monitor like this from a South Korean ebay vendor. Shipping and an international power adapter are included. The monitors are of brands I’ve never heard of in the West, so I guess they mainly supply Asian countries.