Tech Nerd Ramblings

[notabitail]

This is how I'm transferring my stuff. Computer to handle the transfer, and the two NAS systems, all connected to a switch.

 

[azurbanclucker]

I also did get that new cooler for my tower. 30-40C idle and about 70-80C under full load.
View attachment 4292559
I have no idea how on earth to get these cables hidden nicely. This case is kinda bad for cable management. Good thing the side panel hides most of it.

Eh, just zip tie or velcro wrap them neatly so they look like an effort was made. sometimes there's nothning you can do

 

[notabitail]

It turns out I was using a cable that had issues with Gigabit Ethernet... Swapped the cable and now it's going faster than 80 hours to transfer my photos.

 

[notabitail]

I guess this beats 80 hours...

ZFS on TrueNAS seems to be using up all of the RAM. I suppose more RAM is in order for this machine.

 

[notabitail]

I finally got the thing all set up.

Yesterday was spent trying to get Immich to restore from a backup. The TrueNAS version didn't want to do so, and I semi-accidentally fried the working install on the old NAS, so I did a clean install.

From there I had to get Snipe-IT up (having too much tech stuff leads to this...). It was painfully easy and hard. I couldn't figure out how TrueNAS's docker installer works, so I tried to do it the sane way through its terminal. That didn't work. I ended up finding out you can do "containers" in it, so I went that way. I had some odd issues with getting it set up, but copying over the contents of the docker compose and env from my old server worked. I spent way too much time on that.

So far it seems to be fine. Streaming video from it (via VLC) is much smoother than the old one. The old one would stutter at times, and this one seems to refrain from doing so.

The only other thing I did was toss my retirement fund 16GB of DDR3 RAM into it. I had put 8GB, but figured 16GB would probably be better for its performance. It does seem to be taking advantage of it.

 

[notabitail]

I finally got the thing all set up.

Yesterday was spent trying to get Immich to restore from a backup. The TrueNAS version didn't want to do so, and I semi-accidentally fried the working install on the old NAS, so I did a clean install.

From there I had to get Snipe-IT up (having too much tech stuff leads to this...). It was painfully easy and hard. I couldn't figure out how TrueNAS's docker installer works, so I tried to do it the sane way through its terminal. That didn't work. I ended up finding out you can do "containers" in it, so I went that way. I had some odd issues with getting it set up, but copying over the contents of the docker compose and env from my old server worked. I spent way too much time on that.

So far it seems to be fine. Streaming video from it (via VLC) is much smoother than the old one. The old one would stutter at times, and this one seems to refrain from doing so.

The only other thing I did was toss my retirement fund 16GB of DDR3 RAM into it. I had put 8GB, but figured 16GB would probably be better for its performance. It does seem to be taking advantage of it.

I also got my laptop upgraded to the latest Kubuntu. Poor thing has been bugging me about it for ages.

And Discover (KDE app store) finally works again. That app is usually pretty buggy for me though.

 

[notabitail]

I'm taking apart an old Sony laptop that only turns on when pressure is applied to the area right over the CPU.

These laptops aren't the most fun to take apart. There's a lot of screw to track. Thing is, if you put them on a mat in a reasonably decent layout, you can easily put the laptop back together, with a very high chance of not putting screws in the wrong hole. Sony puts arrows pointing to the necessary screws on the logic board itself. This makes the laptop so much easier to take apart and reassemble. Other laptops I have taken apart usually don't have these markings.

As a side bonus to the screw marks, Sony even went to the extent of marking out where the antenna wires should go across the logic board with a white line. It's one of the coolest things with these older Sony laptops that makes them special.

 

[notabitail]

I'm taking apart an old Sony laptop that only turns on when pressure is applied to the area right over the CPU.

These laptops aren't the most fun to take apart. There's a lot of screw to track. Thing is, if you put them on a mat in a reasonably decent layout, you can easily put the laptop back together, with a very high chance of not putting screws in the wrong hole. Sony puts arrows pointing to the necessary screws on the logic board itself. This makes the laptop so much easier to take apart and reassemble. Other laptops I have taken apart usually don't have these markings.

As a side bonus to the screw marks, Sony even went to the extent of marking out where the antenna wires should go across the logic board with a white line. It's one of the coolest things with these older Sony laptops that makes them special.

It turns out the GPU is the issue. It's a Radeon 9700 according to the sticker on the laptop. For some reason or another, these things failing seems really familiar. I think I've heard similar stories of these chips having bad solder somewhere.

 

[notabitail]

On a different note from fixing old computers, LineageOS finally got Android 16 QPR2. It feels weird on my phone. It does oddly enough feel snappier than pre-Material Expressive Android, I'm guessing because of the animations taking less time for certain things. The default Roboto font does need to be changed to something like Sans Flex, it does look pretty bad: