Devices

New Desktop Upgrade

My new desktop I mentioned at the end of my last post arrived. I am fairly good about adjusting my workflow when changes or upgrades happen, but this particular change in it’s nature, is incredibly disruptive. My whole process kind of stems out from a source, which for the most part, is either my laptop or my desktop. If I were to get a new laptop, not much would change. Most of that workflow runs off of shared drives or cloud files. On the base level, the desktop works the same way, the real trick I get to deal with is the ripple effect downstream, which I will get more into in a bit.

The machine itself runs fine. It’s much much quieter than I expected it to be, which is nice. The crazy Neon lights aren’t as slightly annoying as I expected, especially once I figured out how to adjust them to be a more toned down, non pulsating, single, cooler color. The day after ordering, I realized that I might need new monitor cables, I checked and sure enough, all of the outputs save one are Display Port. My old set up consisted of a display port adapter, a DVI port and an HDMI out, all three to DVI on the monitor end. I may update the monitors later but it’s not necessary now.

The inside is crazy empty and clean. I’m not quite sure yet where I would even put additional hard drives, though I suspect they mount to the sides.

It certainly handles every game I’ve thrown at it incredibly smoothly even with maxed out graphical settings. My current plan is to keep this machine relegated mostly for gaming (a bit more on this later), so i will keep it fairly clean and free from excess software. So far I’ve tried it out with Forza Horizon 4, Overwatch, Black Desert Online, Minecraft, Control, Quake 2, and Quake 2 RTX.

The RTX is really quite remarkable. The reflections are really neat and the shadows work very well. I look forward to finding more titles that take advantage of the ray tracing capabilities.

The Ripple Effect

Where the real change is happening is down the line. For the sake of maybe alleviating some confusion, I am going to go ahead and use the Network names for my computers. The old workflow consisted of my Windows 10 Desktop, Squall, that I originally put together back in 2012. It still runs everything perfectly fine, since 2012, I’ve bumped up the RAM quite a bit, updated to an SSD, and updated the video card to a 1050ti. Sitting under the desk next to that was Rinoa, am even older box, that I am pretty sure I got second hand somewhere, running Xubuntu Linux. Xubuntu because, it’s only 32bit hardware. It’s primary function was being a web server, for my Dashboard, and a file server. It’s got several old drives in it all shared on the network to dump less important files to, because I’m a digital packrat.

The new machine is Cloud. See a pattern here yet. If it helps my laptop is Selphie, my old laptop was Rikku, my old project server years ago was Quistis and before that Yuna, my family’s laptops are Ivine, Barret,and RedXIII. They are all Final Fantasy characters.

Rinoa running 32bit hardware has been a problem for a while. Several interesting projects I have found needed to run on a 64bit system to get up and running. It’s also woefully under powered for anything robust, like running a Minecraft Server. Rinoa has been desperately in need to replacing for a while. Which is where Squall comes in now. Squall, will become the “new Rinoa”. Squall will become the new project server.

Making this change isn’t easy, it’s still not done, and I’ve been working on it for the last week. Squall is also a much more capable machine, so it changes the workflow a bit. Where Rinoa ran headless, I’ve decided to keep Squall on one of my three monitors for now, and work with it using Synergy. I can offload the load of doing things like, running the web browser off of Cloud to Squall if I want. I also can use Squall for Discord and IRC.

The first thing I decided to do was to move the Web server aspect to a Raspberry Pi. I already had a Pi running a LAMP stack to host my WordPress Archive blob. Moving the basic Dashboard was easy. Copy the files, import/export the database, and it worked, no problem. The harder part was moving the backend processes. I’ve started doing a lot of combination projects, that often consist of some sort of Python or Bash script running that dumps data to a database, and a web based GUI. Like the Network Map, or my rudimentary Twitter Scheduler or the web based Download Queue system for a particular web video downloading software that shall not be named. Getting these to work on the Pi is trickier. Partially because I’d forgotten some steps. For example, I created some environmental variables to open the database with scripts, so I didn’t have to put raw log in credentials in them. I forgot how I had done that, so I converted them back to raw log in credentials for now. I have others that are looking for commands from packages that need to be installed that I’m not sure are available on the Pi.

I’ll get it worked out, I just need a bit more time.

I’m also not real sure I want to move TT-RSS to the same Raspberry Pi, just because it’s constantly polling. I am not sure I want to run that level of read/write on an SD card and risk losing my other files. I will probably just set up a second Pi JUST to run the TT-RSS Server.

The other major thing to move is the files. I started off by consolidating everything, for simplicity’s sake. I converted and consolidated up my video files on my NAS recently, which freed up a lot of space. I’ve been meaning to re-allocate some files off of Rinoa back to the NAS and I used the move as an excuse to do just that. At the same time I consolidated the remaining files onto the largest of the various drives in Rinoa, so I can start off by just moving one drive to Squall, to reshare on the network. Moving the webserver to the Pi also meant giving the Pi an extra USB drive, for more storage. The Video Downloader that Shall Not Be Named, pulls video files, which are larger. I set up a new network share from the Pi for “Working files” and moved all of the “working Files” folders from Rinoa to the Pi.

The process overall isn’t complicated, it’s just time consuming with large data moves and some configuration changes.

Physical Set Up

Another aspect to adjust was the physical set up. Initially I just pulled Rinoa out and stuck Cloud in it’s place on the floor. This was partially done because this was the best solution for cable lengths available until the new Display Port cables arrived. I’ve got some pretty good cable management going on and I am not a fan of cables just hanging all over, a side effect of 15 years of working around equipment racks with impeccable cable management standards. Once the monitor cables arrived, I undid everything and reran all the cables, putting Squall on the floor and Cloud up on the little floor shelf under my desk. The main downside in the end is that the cleaner cable solution puts the large side window on the new PC against the backside, so I don’t get to see inside my PC all the time. Thankfully, I’m not a big fan of this aspect of the machine to start with.

Rinoa is going to just sit behind the monitors on a shelf for a bit until I finish with her, but in the end, the plan is to retire that machine out.

Going Forward

I am actually almost more excited about the prospect of molding Squall into the new Project server than I am the flashy new Gaming Rig. The 64 bit hardware and 24gb of RAM means I can do a whole hell of a lot more than I ever could with Rinoa. I can set up a massive Minecraft server with a whole heap of worlds available. I can run Docker and everything that goes along with that, I can set up a robust and speedy OpenSIM world if I want. I also plan to continue to use Squall as my Video Edit machine, no need to bog down Cloud with all that extra overhead in software and disk space. I also can much more easily start playing around with VMs.

I could have done a lot of this before of course, but I find keeping all of that up and going on a machine you are also using for day to day use and gaming gets distracting, and you start running into resource use issues much more quickly.

Organizing Digitally – The NAS

I want to do a sort of series about how I have my digital world organized but I was sort of trying to decide the best place to start. I wanted to run down some file structure methods, and I want to run down Office 365 use, and previous backup methods, but ultimately, the core of everything, is my NAS.

So this is also sort of a followup to that last set of articles about my Synology NAS. I am sure there are other ways to do a lot of what the Synology does, but there are a lot of simple to use built in features that are nicely integrated into my workflow. It’s a little pricey to set up initially, with the box and the drives, but the reality it, any good solution will be.

Features I Use

These aren’t in any particular order, but I wanted to touch on the aspects of the NAS that I use pretty regularly.

  • OpenVPN – I used to go to a lot of hassle opening up firewall ports on my home network to different devices and machines, so I could access web cams or SSH to different servers and blah blah blah. This is a bit of a security problem, since it means lots of open target points as well. I’ve long since dumped that in favor of OpenVPN, which is built into the NAS. I connect through my laptop or my phone to my home network, then I connect to whatever network drive or SSH connection I need to. It works perfectly and requires way less hassling with the firewall.
  • Download Station – This is essentially a Tor downloader, though I think it can handle a lot of other url types. I don’t really directly interact with this, I keep a folder for incoming files that I occasionally sort and a watch folder for Torrent files that it pulls from. The fun part is syncing the watch folder using One Drive, so I can dump Torrent files to it from anywhere. And for what it’s worth, I don’t use this for piracy, primarily I use it for downloading Humble Bundle purchases. A bundle often has 20+ items, so I will bulk download the torrents (to save HB some bandwidth) and then dump them into the watch folder.
  • Video Station/DS Video – I tried running Plex for watching digital movies from the NAS but it was flaky as hell since there isn’t an official Synology app and Plex is increasingly pushing their subscription nonsense instead of just being a client/server self hosted application. Fortunately, there are Synology Apps for Fire TV (Which I use for streaming on both TVs). So I’ve sorted all of my home movies into the Videos folder and (for a future blog post) encoded them to be easily accessible and compatible.
  • Photo Station – Ok, I don’t actually use this… yet… but I want to revisit it going forward. I want to do a separate post on photos with more details, but basically, I wasn’t using the Photos folder for backup purposes, and that situation has changes recently.
  • Audio Station – I have a ton of music from different sources compiled and sorted together. It’s not my primary GoTo for music, but I want to get more organized playlists going so I can more easily use this for playing my music. For the most part, I am fine with just sticking music ON my phone though.
  • Mail Station – I don’t use Mail Station for actually sending emails, but I did set up the Mail Station server and I use it as a deep archive of emails. I essentially have all my email I have ever sent, going back to the 90s, pulled forward through various email clients, and now it’s all dumped into a Mail Server in a sorted, searchable archive.
  • Cloud Sync – Cloud Sync lets you hook your Synology to various cloud drive services and sync them to your local drives. I’ve got several Dropbox accounts that I have used in the past (Personal, server syncing, each family member) and now a couple of One Drive accounts for backup and personal document sync all linked. It even does Google Drive.

Features I Stopped Using

There aren’t a lot of features I have stopped using, but there are a couple.

  • Web Station – The Synology comes with an optional Webserver and a weird WordPress system that can be enabled. This has been weirdly buggy since day one and I already have plenty of experience managing LAMP stack servers. I recently disted off one of my older Pis, set it up with WordPress and moved the primary use I was using the Synology Web Station for to the Pi. Mostly, It was just a WordPress Archive of all of my old blog posts from various blogs. The links were weird and didn’t work properly because it didn’t quite understand subdirectories or something. The images were present but they didn’t always work because they pointed to old URLs and working the SQL system to change them always came off as wonky. Basically, I didn’t need this archive to be on the NAS and it was an easy thing to just offload to another device.
  • Cloud Station Server – This is a back up system for devices and computers. It will sync specific local folders to a folder on the NAS as a backup. Maybe I was doing something wrong but it always felt really flaky as well, so I just sort of stopped using it. I had it on every laptop in the family for a while but as laptops were replaced, then things started getting weird and getting others to grok how to pull back their files wasn’t super easy either. The better solution I have found is to just give everyone a shared folder specific to them that they can shove files they want to keep into. For my personal use it was just redundant because my entire workflow for years has essentially been cloud based with Dropbox or One Drive keeping everything backed up by default.
  • Surveillance Station – I still sort of use this, but all of my webcams died except one, which doesn’t have night mode anymore. So, it exists and I would use it, but I don’t really use it much anymore. Also. frankly, there was never anything worth seeing on the recordings.

Workflow

The real workflow from the NAS comes from shared folders. Everyone has access to the Family Photos folder mapped to their laptops. I created a shared folder for all of the Blog graphics my wife was using for her blog work that everyone can access since my daughters both helped her with that. They use a shared drive for all of the Ebay and Mercari photos they work on.

I keep folders for photos, and videos and ebooks. I keep folders for important family documents like Tax Returns. All of this can easily be synced to a backup in the cloud and I have a couple of USB keys and loose drives that I do periodic manual backups to, that get stuck in a fire proof safe.

It also lets me map other network drives in as well, for shuffling files around. I have a whole second Linux box set up that has another 4TB or so space in it across several drives, that I use to store less important files like Installable programs and games, ISOs, temporary files for video editing projects, a mountain of internet memes and images saved over the years, music concerts I’ve downloaded, etc. Plus I can map things like, the web root for my Raspberry Pi, or set up a one way(ish) SSH tunnel to my Webserver for pulling backups through.

The box itself sits behind the TV upstairs, and if there ever was a fire or something, it’s likely one of the things I might try to grab on the way out the door, but I’d like to thing my system is robust enough that even if it were lost anything important would be recoverable.

A Second Hard Drive in My Aspire E 15

Recently I purchased an SSD for my wife’s Thinkpad. It wasn’t a big one, 256 gig, but her laptop is a little slow all around and the bottleneck seems to be mostly in the drive, which I am pretty sure is still old school spinning platters.

Unfortunately, the drive in her laptop is 320 Gb, so I couldn’t straight clone the drives. I could have done some partition size adjustments and made it work but she was already fussing and worrying I was going to lose some of her files so I decided I’d just wait and get a larger one later.

I’d already planned to pick up a second one of these drives to add to my Laptop. The main drive is one of those funky newer styles that’s basically a circuit board, but it has an empty bay for a laptop drive. I stuck the new SSD in and went about using it. Nothing hard here at all.

To my surprise, the drive vanished a week or so later. Thankfully I didn’t stick it in my wife’s laptop, it was apparently bad. Or was it?

Turns out that because the drive is a little on the small size, even for a 2.5″ drive, and there isn’t any mechanism inside the laptop to secure the drive itself, it ended up coming lose and losing it’s connection.

It’s probably not the cleanest fix, but I stripped off a half a sheet of paper and accordion folded it and slipped it in between the drive and the Laptop chassis. This applies pressure to the drive, holding it in place.

I haven’t had any trouble with the drive since. Still it’s kind of a crummy design.