Dear Linux, I want to love you. I do. I want to have your babies, I want those babies to understand that you’re great. But you’re not, and it hurts.

I’ve dumped Windows (again) and I’m making a concerted effort to make Linux work no matter what. I did the usual of going through all the latest versions of all the ‘better’ distros, I settled on Linux Mint with GNOME installed and it’s fine.

Common Linux bugbears for me tend to be:

Package manager wise, I prefer APT, SMB for my NAS just isnt pretty. You have to go into files, down to the location at the bottom of the window and type in your network address. In Mint, thankfully, it automatically picks up my NAS and I dont have to do this. For me, those two things are a big win.

Gaming is in two flavours, either via Steam and piracy.

In Steam, I have a Steam Deck also so I am now more used to it, but some games require you to play ‘hit and miss’ with proton versions to try and get working. FFXV is a perfect example, anything newer than v6 causes artifacts under Mint and it’s a pain. I just want it to ‘work’.

Piracy under Linux, again I think thanks to the Steam Deck, has come a long way thanks to WINE, Lutris and the Heroic Games Launcher. I’ve NEVER managed to get this working properly. I’ve always gone back to Windows because something’s come out that I want to play but dont want to buy it without giving it a go. Whatever your views are on piracy, I dont care. Sorry. You do you, Ill do me. So the new Elden Ring DLC came out and I thought I’d use that as my yardstick to get working, after an afternoon of headscratching I now think Ive got the whole thing sorted out in my autistic brain. I’m using HGL and it runs the game great – I dont like Elden Ring, but I wasnt about to fork over a 50 just to try it.

Similarly to piracy, I love using Photoshop. I understand there’s ways to get this working with the above launchers, it’s going to be my next adventure into tinkering, but I cant say Im looking forward to it. I hate dual booting, I just end up with having two seperate installations that I need to keep switching between and it’s extremely inconvenient.

I appreciate that not all of the above are the fault of Linux, or the Mint team etc, it’s just my use case. I realise that the core of Windows, what it SHOULD be, is what’s spoiled me all these years. I just cant be bothered with the mega corporation bullshit anymore. Microsoft has been really screwing the pooch over the past couple of months and it’s now less than trivial how much I hate what Windows has become.

So yeah, I’m trying to be friends with Linux but it’s hard. It’s like that friend that you love hanging out with, but then they get drunk and abusive and you just cant be around them anymore. I want to love Linux, and I’m going to keep trying.

Tidied up a little, now with Virgin Media 1GB package that’s just amazing.

From the bottom up:

On the right is the backup server, dont ask me for names and shit I’m drunk and cant remember. I am loving the Unifi blue patch cables though.

This is literally amazing. Loving the automation, because I cant Prox for shit.

https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/

The older I get, the less I want to have to interact with things. I mean, people, work, friends, lovers, computers, and operating systems. Basically, all the things.

I’ve been trying to find an operating system to use ‘most of the time’ other than windows. I really want to use Linux, but damn man, it’s a pain.

I’d love to use an immutable OS. It just sounds so cool, and easy. BlendOS is immutable and gives you the choice of all the other base systems in one. Great. Alma gives you the option of all of the above, and a double-boot partition so that if an update doesnt work okay, then it reverts. Even better.

The problem is that these OS’s dont seem to be able to get the fundamentals right. I mean, I love Gnome, right? There’s other people out there who do too, I’m sure. But there’s always an issue: i.e. samba doesnt work right, graphics drivers dont work right, samba doesnt work right… and over and over and over. I appreciate that I’m probably a ‘power user’ as much as I hate the term, but I think after 40 years of *nix that they should have the basic shit down. Alas, it doesnt seem to be the case.

Linux just isnt ready for mainstream. Its awful, Debian, Manjaro, Ubuntu, they just arent ready for the mainstream at all. Dear lord people get the linux shit sorted out. All I want is parity with Windows – I want to be able to put in a USB stick, and deal with it, I want to be able to map a network share, and deal with it, I want to get able to ‘game’ (quotes even if through steam which is the best case scenario without getting experimental) and not have to deal with shit.

Sigh. Its all just shit.

As such Im now back to PopOS which at least seems to have SMB down from the first try, better than Ubuntu (which it’s based on) at least… and yeah, you’re going to wax lyrical about ways that it would work (if anyone actually viewed this site) but as a whole I have to say the ease of use for the common everyday folk is rubbish. This is not news, I understand that, but this is the illustration of my frustration.

Blep.

I’ve been Proxmox-ing and it’s pretty cool. One of those things that I’ve started a few times but never followed through with, I’ve a HP Elitedesk G3 Mini, actually I’ve two, and a larger G3 that I’ve been playing with. One has Batocera on it and is working great up till, like, Dreamcast, and the Proxmox server is working great hosting an Xpenology server – 2TB of storage on NVME, 8GB of RAM (will be upgraded to 32GB tomorrow when my Crucial RAM arrives!) and it’s working great tbh. I’ve set up a load of Windows VMs as you can see, Win11 still wont boot but I’ll find out why when I get more time.

A nice little tech excursion and very nerdy, ‘it just works’.

I’ve been having issues with my NVME drives on my main gaming PC. I don’t use it a lot, but I have two NVME drives in the machine:

1. WD Blue SN500 (PCIE gen 3)
2. Sabrent 1tb Rocket (PCIE gen 4)

The WD has been solid, it’s great, it’s just slower and doesn’t have a lot of space. The Sabrent is obviously bigger and faster, but I’ve been really using it more as a ‘games drive’ as it’s basically just a secondary drive on my machine. Windows 11 (or whichever OS I’m using at the time) on the 500, installs on the 1tb.

Over the past couple of years I’ve had these drives, it’s bugged me a little that I was using the slower drive for the OS, so I decided to move from Windows 10 to Windows 11, swap my OS onto the 1tb drive and hoped that I would be happy…

Hoped…

Within a couple of days of using the Sabrent Rocket I started getting sudden power-offs on the PC. It would just be ‘pop’ and the machine was suddenly without power. I can remember from when I first started using the Sabrent that something similar may have happened, hence using it as a backup drive, but I didn’t want to rule out power supply/ram, all the usual issues.

After more playing about (I have an X570 Aorus Pro, 5700G – I know but there was a valid reason for it – 32GB ram) I am sure that it is the drive, I’ve been using the WD drive in the other slot, as the Pro has 2 NVME gen 4 slots, and the slot seems fine, the drive seems fine in there and there’s no issues.

As such I’ve removed the SN500 and I’ve got a little USB-C caddy coming for it today, it can just be a mass storage USB device for moving files around.

Today I’ve ordered a Crucial P3 Plus 2tb drive which is going to hopefully become my main drive (it’s gen 4) and should be nice and quick, I just thought it would be fun to post a break down and a Crystal Diskmark screenshot of the speeds. I don’t have the new drive yet, but this is the Sabrent score – bare in mind it’s just gen 3. Will update again over the next couple of days when I can install the new drive!

Loving the Steam Deck – this is the base version, updated the SSD to a 256 from the base 64. Had it for a little while, this is the dock and the keyboard/mouse setup. The keyboard is a Logitech K295, silent touch, it’s really quiet and came with the wireless mouse. Had these for a few months also and haven’t had to change the batteries, which is a plus!

All the usual Steam Deck fun, mostly I play this for emulation, seems to be very much more geared towards a console experience, rather than play something that needs a mouse and keyboard. The mouse and keyboard I usually just use for desktop mode, I don’t have this hooked to a display, I tend to just sit in a comfortable chair laid back and playing old games and occasionally something new – mostly RPGs and the like. The USB-C dock is fine, just use it as shown with the receiver for the mouse and keyboard. It has HDMI out, some USBs and SD Card ports but Ive never used them with the Steam Deck.

All in all very much appreciating the time off work, although it looms all too quickly round the corner of the weekend – I truly hope that this coming year is better than the last… actually the last dozen years or so, hopes are not altogether high.

It’s been a bit of a nightmare to be totally honest with you. Bought this card and it’s been a headscratcher.

I have been fiddling around with computers for a good number of years, I’m aware of all the old tropes with 10gb, i.e.

• You’re not going to get 10000mb/s
• The speed of your drives dictates the speed of the transfer
• Your cables are important
• Jumbo frames blah blah blah

It seems so simple on the outside, link the ports on Windows, link the ports on Unifi and you’re good to go. Right? Yeah, no. Not right.

Installed the card fine, no worries there. Admittedly I have my Unifi gear two rooms away and there’s a lot of general household detritus around it, but I’m sure the cables are fine. The issue started when trying to aggregate the two ports on the Windows side. Bridging the connections at first would give an error, it would generate a linked adapter in my adapters list, but only one port would be assigned. I would allocate the other port, but this would just disable the bridge altogether. Removing the bridge, rebooting, both the ports would be disabled under Windows and no amount of ‘enabling’ the connection would work.

Removed/reinstalled the drivers (although the original drivers for the card came on a CD – I mean, a bloody CD in this day and age) and the provider didnt have the drivers on their website. I downloaded a generic intel driver and this may well be part of the issue but I believe it should be fine for the chipset on the card.

No matter which way I tried to enable link aggregation on Windows there was no joy. Resetting the IP with ‘netsh int ip reset’ and flushing the DNS seemed to work a couple of times, but then ceased being useful. I dont know why. Trying to get the Windows network troubleshooter to do anything was a waste of time and this just seems to be an app that is purposefully misleading and useless. I mean wtf.

So I opted to forget about the link aggregation and use just a single port on the card. All seemed to be fine, but the transfer speed between my PC and my self built Unraid server was topping at about 180MB/s. This is the speed of the drives in the server. I have a NVME cache, as well as NVME drives in my main PC. I’d stopped using the cache drive as for some reason Unraid seemed to be having issues with the ‘mover’ function, and my cache drive was always full. Anyways I chanced it and enabled the cache on all my shares, and this led to around a 600MB/s transfer to the server, and about a 900MB/s read transferring back from the server to my PC. All good.

I wish I could have gotten the aggregation working, but this will be a job for another day. Unfortunately just before writing this, my 10gb card in my PC disabled itself again, and took a couple of reboots to bring back – again, trying to ‘enable’ it just resulted in nothing happening. Ill test this through tomorrow and it may be that the card goes back to the Amazon seller. I mean, it works, but it’s going to be my main connection and I dont want it falling down every couple of hours. It’s just not worth it for £131.

That being said, I have had issues with the Unifi side and a Wifi6 card I picked up, it’s a Fenvi and it should have been fine, but the Wifi is just not connecting with the Unifi AP. Going back to my old Plusnet router it works fine, and the connection never drops, but on Unifi it just isnt playing ball. I bought the fenvi card as a bluetooth/wifi6 card, but I’ve nixxed the wifi connectivity and it’s just sat there as a BT card in my rig, the BT is working fine so will just keep it for future proofing. Tbh its my train of thought with this 10gb card, but the outlay is a bit high if it’s not 100% stable – again, I’m no super networking wiz, but time will just have to tell and see what happens.

C’est la vie.

What a pigging nightmare! Long story short, the answer is DFU under Windows, if you want to read the epoch below, feel free.

I’m going to use this post to hopefully chronicle what I have done to resolve the issue that’s spanned the past 24 hours of my life. While I dont want to sound too dramatic, we use our phones these days as much more than communication devices – we have our normal phone/text/browser/games, but we also use them for banking, two factor authenticators, password storage devices. The smartphone has become my most personal and most important item in my digital life because not only does it keep me in touch (especially these days) with families and friends I cant see or get to every day, but also my job and my method of 2FA for my home server, my main email, my websites, everything…. and with that said, you can wholly blame me for installing a BETA iOS version on my phone.

Now, yes, I know. Stupid. Yes, I know, my fault. I get it, its fine, I accept it.

So the beta has been quite buggy with a few of my apps, I use a Mac Mini with macOS Monterey (I know, compounding the stupidities here) but I had my backup of my devices (iPad, watch, phone etc) so figured all was good. I figured it was easy enough to ‘downgrade’ from the latest 15 beta to 14.7.1 (latest stable) so attempted to do so. Took a backup, downloaded an ipsw and…..

Problem 1 – IPSW files

Bloody Apple – in their hubris they do not have any public facing download servers for their firmware files. I tried downloading direct links, they either failed or downloaded and my Mac insisted there was some kind of corruption. I dont want to scour random websites for IPSWs, I have an iPhone 12 Mini so can’t jailbreak it (sometimes I found that the jailbreak tools actually work better at restoring files than Apple’s own iTunes/Finder apps). I have an Unraid server, installed a file downloader onto it (Aria2) and used it to download (eventually) the latest iOS 15 beta and the 14.7.1 stable for my model of iPhone.

Problem 2 – restoring the IPSW

So, my phone at the moment is still on the beta, I connect it to the Mac, hold option and restore the 14.7.1 IPSW through finder. The process starts and fails, error 3014. I presume it must have completed somewhat because my phone is now stuck in recovery mode, I cant get back to the homescreen. Fine. Reboot the phone and the Mac, try again, nothing. Finder wont update the phone at all – I then go through all the error codes above, including attempts that dont even render a reboot of the phone to initialise the installation.

Great. Fucked.

I try all the above steps to reinstall the iOS beta IPSW, same results. Nothing is working.

Problem 3 – replacement phone

Without going into details, I have a lot of things going on right now and I REALLY need to have a working phone. I usually have a backup handset but at the moment it’s on extended loan to a friend, another friend of mine was really kind to give me her backup and now at least I can do whatever I need to and Im contactable. Unfortunately due to the age of the backup I cant restore my settings. Which is really bad when…

Problem 4 – your phone is your 2FA

My server, and my main email have 2FA. When you setup your 2FA you are given restore codes, I knew I had these for my email (I hoped Id saved them) but at this point in shit outta luck about my server and the other 2FA I have set up within the device. I found the codes for my email, but the rest of the services I cant get access to until I get a successful restore of my backup… and believe me, we’ll get to that little bloody nugget later. My only choice now that I’m unable to restore the device at all, that I have to go to an Apple Store (the mini is still under warranty thank God) and get it replaced.

Problem 5 – restore mode/DFU mode

During my continual panic I’m still trying different devices to restore my phone. I have my Mac Mini, as well as a Windows 10 laptop, and a PC that has the latest Windows 11 beta installed (okay, I like bleeding edge software, sue me). Attempts to use these machines to restore the iPhone also gave me the errors listed above. The phone gets part way through the install, or doesnt start the install, and fails with an error in Finder/iTunes on Windows.

I remember from back when I used to Jailbreak iPhones that there was a second restore/recovery mode called DFU. On the newer phones you tap vol up, vol down, then hold power – this will take you to the recovery mode. If you press vol up, vol down, hold power and wait for the screen to turn off, then hold vol down and power for 5 seconds, then hold vol down (all whilst your phone is connected to a computer via cable) the phone will be detected by the computer and iTunes/Finder will prompt to restore it, all the while the iPhone’s screen must remain black.

…. and I couldnt get the fucker into DFU at all.

**** intermission **** I go to bed because I’m to stressed and pissed off to do anything else.

Day 2 – with a clear head I start all the above again. Continual fails, again. I watch video after video on Youtube and keep trying to get the phone into DFU, because I’m convinced that this is the answer – I know nothing about DFU mode, but Ive always considered it a ‘better’ way to restore the phone, deeper or something. Whatever. So I keep trying and… I do it! Excellent I think, I go straight to the Mac and start restoring the firmware. I think my issue is that I was holding power and vol down for too long when the device screen was black, it was just rebooting.

But still a fail. I dont know what to do, I put it back into DFU again and a fail with the beta, no luck with the stable and I’m fucked again. I book an appointment at the closest genius bar and hang my head in shame for my failures and continual errors as stated above. I pride myself in being a geek, an enthusiast, a person who doesnt quit in the face of something that gives me shit. Kind of like Superman 😉

My last ditch effort, the last thing I can think of that I havent yet done is to use DFU on iTunes on my Windows devices. My Windows 10 laptop is the most stable, so I switch it on, put my iPhone into DFU and (as at least 30 times before) I restore the stable firmware…

IT BLOODY WORKS

It literally took a Windows 10 laptop to save my iPhone, to save me a trip to the Apple Store (bloody miles away) and saved my hair from becoming any more grey than it is. The phone restores with the stable iOS, great. Sigh of relief. However..

Problem 6 – iOS restore backup

I skip over to my Mac and click restore my backup from the previous day, hopeful I can get all the 2FA back on track and the software profiles etc reinstalled…. and… no, of course not. And this is because of a) my backup is encrypted, I cant remember the password and b) as I would find out when I remembered the password, the backup was for iOS 15, not iOS 14 and therefore would not restore to the older more stable firmware.

FUCK MY LIFE

Anyway, I cross every finger, pinky, toesy, and peepee and try to restore the iOS 15 beta. Success, straight into DFU and it installs the beta. Great. Restore my backup through the Mac, restores fine and the apps are all there, my 2FA is safe and all the data is there, awesome.

Right now, I’m just waiting for the apps to reinstall. Im going to check through the 2FA and disable it, then most likely restore the stable version if iOS if there’s still issues with apps post-clean and restore, but I really wanted to get this written down if not to tell people what to do, then just for me to vent and document what happened so if it happens again I have a reference. I understand all the do’s and dont’s of beta software, Ive worked on iPhones and Android phones in the past and managed to get them back up and running fine, but this was a saga. I think the worst part was my Mac was unable to reinstall the firmware at all – this could be due to Monterey but really I think it’s something that’s just not quite there. Yes, I made errors, but the function of restoring IPSWs (either selectively or through the system itself) is a feature, its built in, it should work on a Mac better than a Windows machine but it took Windows 10 and the iTunes program to get my phone back to a state that was useable. I’m not smart enough to know why one worked over the other, but I’m just glad that it did. If anyone ever reads this, I hope it helps you, if you read it and chuckle at my misfortunes then I’m glad it made you smile 🙂

Time to pass out now and never mess with beta software again 🙁

So happy that everything’s up and running. Also have a G3 Instant from UniFi which is monitoring the front of the house (Ill have to get a one for the other side too at some point) but the UDM Pro is in and working, 10gig is super duper, and I couldn’t be happier.

I havent speed checked the 10gig properly, because macOS seems to be very hesitant to show you transfer speeds. I can probably iperf to the server but I’m not really bothered. It’s all connected via Fiber on the server, Cat6 to the Mac and everything is noticeably much much faster in normal usage. I could do with an SFP+ card for my gaming PC (not currently being used though so not bothered) and another G3 instant, however given that it was sent from the Czech Republic I’m guessing they’re still really hard to get over here. I wish I’d just stuck two in the basket on UniFi’s website but I just didn’t think at the time.

I admittedly havent got a great deal in the rack at the minute, and that 24 port switch is looking super redundant so Ill consider parting with it and getting something PoE (that’s all Im really missing tbh) but its going to take time to rebuild the finances after splashing it all on a whim! Also the old USP 3G that I was using has now been replaced by the UDM.

Chuffed 🙂