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 🙂

Well I managed it a couple of times, but there’s something off in the config somewhere. I’m only topping out at the max of 1gig and cant get much higher. I’ve NVMEs at both ends, but I’ve just thrown more money at the issue and bought a UDM Pro and some fiber cabling to hopefully start the entire rack again and go from there. If nothing ends up working I’ll keep the UDM and send back the 10gig switch – I dont want to, I really dont want to, it would be really sad to do so but will see how tomorrow goes because 7 straight ours of tinkering yesterday really didnt make much of a difference other than making me hella angry and tired!

I was hosting the controller and Pi-hole and other items on Docker on the unraid, and I had to take docker down every time I wanted to make a network change and didnt want to risk damaging anything software wise as unraid has really been running like a dream just doing it’s own thing in the background.

Pi-hole I’ve got running now on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, and the Unifi controller on a Raspberry Pi 4. Means at least I can keep docker down so long as I’m not too bothered about Plex which I can live without for now.

Fingers crossed tomorrow bears some positive networky fruit.

So purrrttyyyy…. Dead easy to get up and running, I’m still waiting for some SFP+ cables, and an SFP+ PCI card for my server. After that, we should…. should…. be off to the races!

More speed is more better, it’s a proven fact. Ask anyone if they would rather have more or less of something and they’re going to tell you: MORE.

At the minute my rack is as below:

I have a self-built Ryzen 3600 Unraid build, a patch panel, a brush panel (which I’ve really never used), a US-24-G1 gigabit switch, another brush panel, and the USG-3P router. Also is a Phillips Hue that I bought on a whim and used for about 5 minutes. All of this sits in the Startech 25U rack, with a lovely covering of dust and other paraphernalia that gets junked ontop of it when I need to make space in the spare room (please forgive the carpet).

The rack has been like this for over a year now, it’s all working great. However, today is the day!

Just a random Sunday morning post, Ive been using my Windows machine for a bit and thought Id switch back to my Mac Mini (stats above, it also has 10gig built in, take that M1!) and I’ve been using Safari really for everything web based. I installed Firefox, which wasnt too bad, but has never really matched the snappyness of Safari and I thought ‘Okay, well its third party so maybe it’s not as optimised’, but just installed Google Chrome this morning and man, it runs like a total dog.

It’s so heavy! The lag while resizing browser windows is HORRIBLE. I know Chrome is a giant beast of a browser, but it makes me wonder how much of the lag is macOS doing it on purpose to promote Apple’s own brower. Yes, Im a cynical sod, but it’s night and day difference even between Firefox and Safari, but Chrome is a terrible experience IMO.

Again, this isnt anything new, it’s just a real surprise that we’ve come so far and the differences between first party and everything else is so skewed it makes me wonder whether its Google’s fault, or Apple’s.