@ricedg
Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
Two different problems, over provision and the disk being full.
Windows should warn you when a drive gets >90% full as it cannot cope with full drives, as you’ve found out.
Over provisioning by not formatting x% of a drive is a new one on me, but reading up now I get it. It seems however that the choice of controller and the technology it uses can have as much impact, depending on your workload. I’m not going to lose sleep over it though.
My Poco F3 and Lenovo Thinkbook both have the fingerprint sensor in the power button, makes absolute sense.
I have become increasingly peed off with the size of my phone when out and about. However I love the size of my phone as my eyesight gets worse 🙂
But at the price they are? I’ll stick to the cargo trousers with the knee pockets.
That was back in the day when the M2 socket was very new, SATA only and shared resources with SATA ports, we’re not talking modern NVMe drives. Things have moved on greatly with chipsets, BIOSes, drives and drivers.
When we get a piece of new tech it nearly always involves bodges at the start. CSM is one huge bodge job. The question is can your set of hardware be bodged to boot from that drive? It seems not and I suspect it’s because it is invisible to the boot process in the same way >2TB drivers were.
I doubt you’ll find a manual for it, but it’s more than likely based on the H170 Pro Gaming motherboard even though it’s a different shape. The manual for that is here
This will help with things like pin outs on sockets and whilst the BIOS will be different as far as updates go, I’ll bet it’s quite close in functionality and navigation even if it looks a bit different. I think there will be enough clues in there to help you achieve whatever it is you’re after and there are 3 or 4 other Asus H170 mobo manuals to investigate.
I really did give up on True Nas too quickly, but TBH I was looking for an easier solution with some hand holding wizards.
However, if mnt, smb and acl don’t faze you, armed with this tutorial you can get a Windows accessible NAS up and running pretty quickly. Once I got my head around translating what ZFS calls things to their Windows equivalent the penny dropped, but you don’t need that to happen as for a home environment, the tutorial will do you just fine.
It also has Plugins like Plex – so you can use it as a Media Server – a sandboxed FreeBSD CLI machine and a VM host https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/gettingstarted/applications/
I have enough ram and disk space to experiment with VM hosting as long as it’s fairly lightweight. I have it in mind to create a Windows Domain Controller which for my needs would be very lightweight indeed. A VM like a PiHole would be no problem, I run mine on my Intel chipped Synology and that is nowhere near as powerful.
Just set it up for Work or School then when it doesn’t find a domain you create a local user. This is exactly what I do with W10 Pro.
The flat Windows 10 GUI drives me mad, as do “scrolling blinds” websites.
A Synology NAS or a Draytek router come with a VPN server and a choice of PPTP, L2TP/IPSec or OpenVPN. You also get a free DDNS address which is used in conjunction with LetsEncrypt! to obtain a free certificate.
Some TP-Link routers also have an OpenVPN server, but I’ve always found them a bit slow.
It depends by what you mean by handle SSDs? It’s based on Windows PE and boots OK on my new Thinkbook; Speccy and HWInfo detect everything. Here is a list of what’s included link The Windows password reset tool works OK as do the drive utilities I’ve used, more than that I’ve not tried yet.
Interesting results from the hard drives. Anything <500GB just got wiped and will be destroyed. There are 2 x 500GB Barracudas, 4 x Seagate 1TB, 6 x 1TB WD Blue and 6 x 1TB WD Green. Most are ~7 years old. Apart from 2 x 1TB Seagates, all pass WD Lifeguard or EaseUs surface test diagnostics (run after wiping).
Just resetting my old laptop for NDIL to use. I’m going to give Avast One Free a whirl as they do a 30 device Family bundle for £110 (£55 intro offer) in case I need an alternative quickly.
Lots and lots of questions, 1GB a month is not a lot either.
Lots of AV provide a free VPN, all limited of course, Kaspersky’s is 200MB a day. Using a VPN at home is IMO not really warranted from a security angle. 99% of your connections are going to be https and a “man in the middle” is extremely unlikely.
If really need a VPN server, Digital Ocean have an automated OpenVPN server builder. The basic $6 a month “droplet” (a Linux VM with 1 CPU, 1GB ram and 25GB SSD) is all you need and it comes with 1000GB of traffic. You get two accounts for free, which will be fine for most people, and it’s easy to find many scripts on the net to build your own which will be unlimited users.
If you’re after geographical shenanigans there are data centres in the US, Europe, Singapore, Canada and India as well as London. The London data centre is Telehouse, so it’s got fantastic connectivity. I used to have one there for MoD work when on the road and it always ran at near line speed.
The droplets are actually billed by the hour, the basic is 9/10 cent, so you can experiment and see if it’s for you without running up bills. I’m sure there’s something similar on AWS, but I much prefer using Digital Ocean.
Usual Government crap, they are never across the detail.
Deliberately putting at risk millions of households and businesses seems totally reckless.
Here’s an alternative – an EMMC card that fits in the SD card slot. £21 for 16GB or £30 for 32GB at PiHut.
Real world benchmark in the reviews puts it between an SD card and a SATA SSD and I imagine won’t interfere with the WiFi.
Looks a bit exposed though.
Due to wholesale changes at Charity Digital, the only AV I could get my hands on and get the work done this weekend was Avast Business Cloudcare. At an 86% discount the price was right and I didn’t have to buy licenses in blocks of 5 or 10 with a minimum or maximum. I later found out that’s because Charity Digital are a Partner of Avast and run the system.
It’s managed very much like Bitdefender in that there are policies and groups available, but it much more SMB friendly and the default policy is not uber lock downed in nature. About the only thing I tweaked was to specify their office network so that it’s trusted (Microsoft so of ten default to Public these days) and set a sensible delay after boot time to look for updates (far too much kicks off at once).
A sensible range of alerts has been set up on the Dashboard, which can be emailed as well, as can an extensive range of reports. It’s easy to get to grips with.
Other services can be added, such as Patch Management and Content Filtering, but at extra cost. However what is included is a Remote Desktop service that works very well indeed. Connections are initiated via the console in an on demand basis with an associated exe file for the session, so there are nothing left open locally once a session is finished.
It has it’s foibles of course, but this is a good alternative for those who want more control than the likes of Norton Lifelock without the complexity of BitDefender. I am impressed, but the real test comes next week when the users are back at their desks!
It doesn’t look like it’s going to be a nagger, but there is an option for a silent mode which is something Lifelock could do with.
Taking the area and dividing by the population is meaningless out of context. Wales’s population is heavily concentrated in Swansea, Cardiff and Newport, the South Wales Valleys and the north-eastern corner. It is therefore an urbanized population so the comparisons are much more relevant than at first look.
You only have to look at Cornwall to see how the figures change when areas become more densely populated. It’s where I recently caught Covid when visiting the family and going into the now packed pubs and streets of Padstow. The family, young and old, all had it long before any of us living in the city and the timing is linked to the various relaxations and tourist influxes.
One of the hot spots in the West was consistently the Somerset Levels where the “population density” is bugger all compared to Bristol, but it’s concentrated in the strings of villages on the dry ridges of land (just look at a map). There’s probably only one Post Office / shop / garage serving a large area and it’s going to be a much smaller premises than our Tesco.
I seem to remember from watching programs on the Black Death that once a disease gets into a community, that’s it no matter how distributed it is. At some stage local people meet, game over.
I was due to have my booster by now, but catching Covid has delayed it.
The latest Amazon delivery brought with it a £9 “Integral Fusion 32GB USB Flash Drive 3.0 with 200MB/s Transfer Speed and a Tough Metal Casing”. Promising a much better read speed than the Sandisk Ultrafit in the same size (but tougher) casing. Unfortunately, despite several attempts and re-imaging, it just won’t boot, falling over in a slew of disk i/o errors at different stages. It’s now formatted with FAT32 and attached to my key ring.
I have another Sandisk Ultrafit that I use as my Windows installation drive, imaged that and it booted straight away. The performance stats were, as expected, the same as the other Ultrafit, which means it failed on Random read IOPS. Subjectively it seems perfectly acceptable in use but no faster than the Official SD card.
I mostly use RPi’s headless on customers premises and use RealVNC or Anydesk to connect. For reliability I think I’ll be sticking with the Ultrafits rather than an SD card.
I did look at the WiFi, but at 34mbps vs the 200+ mbps my PC gets I’ll stick to Ethernet. That was with the SD card BTW, no USB drives plugged in. But a few years ago we would have killed for 34mbps and it’s fast enough for every day use (but not for my network monitoring). On a customer premises I’ll often be using a PoE adapter anyway, keeps it all neat.
Makes sense.
The issue seems to be getting it to be the boot device and AFAIK that’s a BIOS issue. I have seen the boot from 1 drive and run from another before on a PC I worked on. That may be a possibility. Or how about spending the money on a motherboard (& CPU) that can actually do it natively?
Interesting Ed, I too rarely use PiWiFi, especially on a 3B+
I suppose a fix would be an external USB adapter on a longer lead, but that’s moving even further away from the whole point of cheap and small. Price wise it would be easy to be approaching low end NUC territory with all these adaptions.
Then there’s power consumption and bandwidth sharing of the USB 3 sub-system to consider.
-
AuthorPosts