The last new PC I bought was a Dell PowerEdge T110II in 2013. That model had been out for a while and I got it for under $2000. Since then the CPI has gone up by about 20% so it’s probably about $2000 in today’s money. Currently Dell has a special on the T150 tower server (the latest replacement for the T110II) which has a G6405T CPU that isn’t even twice as fast as the i3-3220 (3746 vs 2219) in the T110II according to passmark.com (AKA cpubenchmark.net). The special price is $2600. I can’t remember the details of my choices when purchasing the T110II but I recall that CPU speed wasn’t a priority and I wanted a cheap reliable server for storage and for light desktop use. So it seems that the current entry model in the Dell T1xx server line is less than twice as fast as fast as it was in 2013 while costing about 25% more! An option is to spend an extra $989 to get a Xeon E-2378 which delivers a reasonable 18,248 in that benchmark. The upside of a T150 is that is uses buffered DDR4 ECC RAM which is pretty cheap nowadays, you can get 32G for about $120.

For systems sold as workstations (as opposed to T1xx servers that make great workstations but aren’t described as such) Dell has the Precision line. The Precision 3260 “Compact Workstation” currently starts at $1740, it has a fast CPU but takes SO-DIMMs and doesn’t come with ECC RAM. So to use it as a proper workstation you need to discard the RAM and buy DDR5 unbuffered/unregistered ECC SO-DIMMS – which don’t seem to be on sale yet. The Precision 3460 is slightly larger, slightly more expensive, and also takes SO-DIMMs. The Precision 3660 starts at $2550 and takes unbuffered DDR5 ECC RAM which is available and costs half as much as the SO-DIMM equivalent would cost (if you could even buy it), but the general trend in RAM prices is that unbuffered ECC RAM is more expensive than buffered ECC RAM. The upside to Precision workstations is that the range of CPUs available is significantly faster than for the T150.

The HP web site doesn’t offer prices on their Z workstations and is generally worse than the Dell web site in most ways.

Overall I’m disappointed in the range of workstations available now. As an aside if anyone knows of any other company selling workstations in Australia that support ECC RAM then please let me know.

I have just returned a Philips 438P1 43″ 4K Monitor [1] and gone back to my Samsung 28″ 4K monitor model LU28E590DS/XY AKA UE590.

The main listed differences are the size and the fact that the Samsung is TN but the Philips is IPS. Here’s a comparison of TN and IPS technologies [2]. Generally I think that TN is probably best for a monitor but in theory IPS shouldn’t be far behind.

The Philips monitor has a screen with a shiny surface which may be good for a TV but isn’t good for a monitor. Also it seemed to blur the pixels a bit which again is probably OK for a TV that is trying to emulate curved images but not good for a monitor where it’s all artificial straight lines. The most important thing for me in a monitor is how well it displays text in small fonts, for that I don’t really want the round parts of the letters to look genuinely round as a clear octagon or rectangle is better than a fuzzy circle.

There is some controversy about the ideal size for monitors. Some people think that nothing larger than 28″ is needed and some people think that a 43″ is totally usable. After testing I determined that 43″ is really too big, I had to move to see it all. Also for my use it’s convenient to be able to turn a monitor slightly to allow someone else to get a good view and a 43″ monitor is too large to move much (maybe future technology for lighter monitors will change this).

Previously I had been unable to get my Samsung monitor to work at 4K resolution with 60Hz and had believed it was due to cheap video cards. I got the Philips monitor to work with HDMI so it’s apparent that the Samsung monitor doesn’t do 4K@60Hz on HDMI. This isn’t a real problem as the Samsung monitor doesn’t have built in speakers. The Philips monitor has built in speakers for HDMI sound which means one less cable to my PC and no desk space taken by speakers.

I bought the Philips monitor on eBay in “opened unused” condition. Inside the box was a sheet with a printout stating that the monitor blanks the screen periodically, so the seller knew that it wasn’t in unused condition, it was tested and failed the test. If the Philips monitor had been as minimally broken as described then I might have kept it. However it seems that certain patterns of input caused it to reboot. For example I could be watching Netflix and have it drop out, I would press the left arrow to watch that bit again and have it drop out again. On one occasion I did a test and found that a 5 second section of Netflix content caused the monitor to reboot on 6/8 times I viewed it. The workaround I discovered was to switch between maximised window and full-screen mode when it had a dropout. So I just press left-arrow and then ‘F’ and I can keep watching. That’s not what I expect from a $700 monitor!

I considered checking for Philips firmware updates but decided against it because I didn’t want to risk voiding the warranty if it didn’t work correctly and I decided I just didn’t like the monitor that much.

Ideally for my next monitor I’ll get a 4K screen of about 35″, TN, and a screen that’s not shiny. At the moment there doesn’t seem to be many monitors between 32″ and 43″ in size, so 32″ may do. I am quite happy with the Samsung monitor so getting the same but slightly larger is fine. It’s a pity they stopped making 5K displays.

• [1] https://www.philips.com.au/c-p/438P1_75/brilliance-4k-ultra-hd-lcd-display-with-multiview
• [2] https://history-computer.com/tn-vs-ips/

I concluded my previous post about the Purism Librem 5 [1] with the phone working as a Debian/GNOME system with SSH access over the LAN. Before I published that post I managed to render it unbootable, making a new computer unbootable on the first day of owning it isn’t uncommon for me. In this case I tried to get SE Linux running on it and changing the kernel commandline parameter “security=apparmor” to “security=selinux” caused it to fail the checksum on kernel parameters and halt the boot. That seems to require a fresh install, it seems possible that I could setup my Librem5 to boot a recovery image from a SD card in such situations but that doesn’t seem to be well documented and I didn’t have any important data to lose. If I do figure out how to recover data by booting from a micro SD card I’ll document it.

Here’s the documentation for reflashing the phone [2], you have to use the “--variant luks” option for the flashing tool to have an encrypted root filesystem (should default to on to match the default shipping configuration). There is an option --skip-cleanup to allow you to use the same image multiple times, but that probably isn’t useful. The image that is available for download today has the latest kernel update that I installed yesterday so it seems that they quickly update the image which makes it convenient to get the latest (dpkg is slow on low power ARM systems). Overall the flash tool is nicely written, does the download and install and instructs you how to get the phone in flashing mode. It is a minor annoyance that the battery has to be removed as part of the flashing process, I will probably end up flashing my phone more often than I want to take the back off the case. A mitigating factor is that the back is well designed and doesn’t appear prone to having it’s plastic tabs breaking off when removed (as has happened to several other phones I’ve owned).

The camera doesn’t seem to work well at this time, all photos have an unusually low brightness. The audio recording also doesn’t work well, speaking clearly into the phone results in quiet recordings.

I updated the Debian Wiki page on Mobile devices [3] to include a link to a page about the Librem5 [4] and to also have a section about applications known to work well on mobile devices. Hopefully other people will make some additions to that as most programs in Debian don’t work well on mobile devices so we need a list of known good applications as well as applications that can be easily changed to work well.

One thing I’ve started looking at is the code for the Geary MUA (the default MUA for the Librem5 and the only one in Debian I know to be suitable for a phone). It needs the Thunderbird style autoconfig and it needs the ability to select which IMAP folders to scan as a common practice is to have some large IMAP folders that aren’t used on mobile devices.

I believe that Android runs each app in a separate UID to prevent them from messing with each other. The configuration on a standard Linux system and on PureOS is to have all apps running with the same permissions, I think this needs to be improved both for phones and for regular Linux systems which will probably benefit more than phones do. I’ll write another blog post about this.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/15/librem-5-first-impression/
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/y473wo3h
• [3] https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile
• [4] https://wiki.debian.org/Librem5

I just received the Purism Librem 5 that I paid for years ago (I think it was 2018). The process of getting the basic setup done was typical (choosing keyboard language, connecting to wifi, etc). Then I tried doing things. One thing I did was update to the latest PureOS release which gave me a list of the latest Debian packages installed which is nice.

The first problem I found was the lack of notification when the phone is trying to do something. I’d select to launch an app, nothing would happen, then a few seconds later it would appear. When I go to the PureOS app store and get a list of apps in a category nothing happens for ages (shows a blank list) then it might show actual apps, or it might not. I don’t know what it’s doing, maybe downloading a list of apps, if so it should display how many apps have had their summary data downloaded or how many KB of data have been downloaded so I know if it’s doing something and how long it might take.

Running any of the productivity applications requires a GNOME keyring, I selected a keyring password of a few characters and it gave a warning about having no password (does this mean it took 3 characters to be the same as 0 characters?). Then I couldn’t unlock it later. I tried deleting the key file and creating a new one with a single character password and got the same result. I think that such keyring apps have little benefit, all processes in the session have the same UID and presumable can use ptrace to get data from each other’s memory space. If the keyring program was SETGID and the directory used to store the keyring files was a system directory with execute access only for that group then it might provide some benefit (SETGID means that ptrace is denied). Ptrace is denied for the keyring but relying on a user space prompt for the passphrase to a file that the user can read seems of minimal benefit as a hostile process could read the file and prompt for the passphrase. This is probably more of a Debian issue, and I reproduced the keyring issue with my Debian workstation.

The Librem 5 is a large phone (unusually thick by modern phone standards) and is rumoured to be energy hungry. When I tried charging it from the USB port on my PC (HP ML110 Gen9) the charge level went down. I used the same USB port and USB cable that I use to charge my Huawei Mate 10 Pro every day, so other phones can draw more power from that USB port and cable faster than they use it.

The on-sceen keyboard for the Librem 5 is annoying, it doesn’t have a TAB key and the cursor control keys are unreasonably small. The keyboard used by ConnectBot (the most popular SSH client for Android) is much better, it has it’s own keys for CTRL, ESC, TAB, arrows, HOME, and END in addition to the regular on-screen keyboard. The Librem 5 comes with a terminal app by default which is much more difficult to use than it should be due to the lack of TAB filename completion etc.

The phone has a specified temperature range of 0C to 35C, that’s not great for Australia where even the cooler cities have summer temperatures higher than that. When charging on a fast charger (one that can provide energy faster than the phone uses it) the phone gets quite warm. It feels like more than 10C hotter than the ambient temperature, so I guess I can’t charge it on Monday afternoon when the forecast is 31C! Maybe I should put a USB charger by my fridge with a long enough cable that I can charge a phone that’s inside the fridge, seriously.

Having switches to disable networking is a good security feature and designing the phone with separate components that can’t interfere with each other is good too. There are reports that software fixes will reduce the electricity use which will alleviate the problems with charging and temperature. Most of my problems are clearly software related and therefore things that I can fix (in theory at least – I don’t have unlimited coding time).

Overall this wasn’t the experience I had hoped for after spending something like $700 and waiting about 4 years (so long that I can’t easily find the records of how long and how much money).

Getting It Working

It seems that the PureOS app store app doesn’t work properly. I can visit the app site and then select an app to install which then launches the app store app to do the install, which failed for every app I tried.

Then I tried going to the terminal and running the following:

sudo bash
apt update
apt install openssh-server netcat

So I should be able to use APT to install everything I want and use the PureOS web site as a guide to what is expected to work on the phone.

As an aside the PureOS apt repository appears to be a mirror or rebuild of the Debian/Bullseye arm64 archive without non-free components that they call Byzanteum.

Then I could ssh to my phone via “ssh purism@purism” (after adding an entry to /etc/hosts with the name purism and a static entry in my DHCP configuration to match) and run “sudo bash” to get root. To be able to login to root directly I had to install a ssh key (root is setup to login without password) and run “usermod --expiredate= root” (empty string for expire date) to have direct root logins.

I put the following in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/local.conf to restrict who can login (I added the users I want to the sshusers group). It also uses the ClientAlive checks because having sessions break due to IP address changes is really common with mobile devices and we don’t want disconnected sessions taking up memory forever.

AllowGroups sshusers
PasswordAuthentication no

UseDNS no
ClientAliveInterval 60
ClientAliveCountMax 6

Notifications

The GNOME notification system is used for notifications in the phone UI. So if you install the package libnotify-bin you get a utility notify-send that allows sending notifications from shell scripts.

Final Result

Now it basically works as a Debian workstation with a single-button mouse. So I just need to configure it as I would a Debian system and fix bugs along the way. Presumably any bug fixes I get into Debian will appear in PureOS shortly after the next Debian release.

Recently a relative who owned a 50″ Plasma TV asked me for advice on getting a new TV. Looking at the options all the TVs seem to be smart TVs (running Android with built in support for YouTube and Netflix) and most of them seem to be 4K resolution. 4K doesn’t provide much benefit now as most people don’t have BlueRay DVD players and discs, there aren’t a lot of 4K YouTube videos, and most streaming services don’t offer 4K resolution. But as 4K doesn’t cost much more it doesn’t make sense not to get it.

I gave my relative a list of good options from Kogan (the Australian company that has the cheapest consumer electronics) and they chose a 65″ 4K Smart TV from Kogan. That only cost $709 plus delivery which is reasonably affordable for something that will presumably last for a long time and be used by many people.

Netflix on a web browser won’t do more than FullHD resolution unless you use Edge on Windows 10. But Netflix on the smart tv has a row advertising 4K shows which indicates that 4K is supported. There are some 4K videos on YouTube but not a lot at this time.

Size

It turns out that 65″ is very big. It didn’t fit on the table that had been used for the 50″ Plasma TV.

Rtings.com has a good article about TV size vs distance [1]. According to their calculations if you want to sit 2 meters away from a TV and have a 30 degree field of view (recommended for “mixed” use) then a 45″ TV is ideal.

According to their calculations on pixel sizes, if you have a FullHD display (or the common modern case a FullHD signal displayed on a 4K monitor) that is between 1.8 and 2.5 meters away from you then a 45″ TV is the largest that will be useful. To take proper advantage of a monitor larger than 45″ at a distance of 2 meters you need a 4K signal. If you have a 4K signal then you can get best results by having a 45″ monitor less than 1.8 meters away from you. As most TV watching involves less than 3 people it shouldn’t be inconvenient to be less than 1.8 meters away from the TV.

The 65″ TV weighs 21Kg according to the specs, that isn’t a huge amount for something small, but for something a large and inconvenient as a 65″ TV it’s impossible for one person to safely move. Kogan sells 43″ TVs that weigh 6KG, that’s something that most adults could move with one hand. I think that a medium size TV that can be easily moved to a convenient location would probably give an equivalent viewing result to an extremely large TV that can’t be moved at all. I currently have a 40″ LCD TV, the only reason I have that is because a friend didn’t need it, the previous 32″ TV that I used was adequate for my needs. Most of my TV viewing is on a 28″ monitor, which I find adequate for 2 or 3 people. So I generally wouldn’t recommend a 65″ TV for anyone.

Android for TVs

Android wasn’t designed for TVs and doesn’t work that well on them. Having buttons on the remote for Netflix and YouTube is handy, but it would be nice if there were programmable buttons for other commonly used apps or a way to switch between the last few apps (like ALT-TAB on a PC).

One good feature of Android for TV is that it can display a set of rows of shows (similar to the Netflix method of displaying) where each row is from a different app. The apps I’ve installed on that TV which support the row view are Netflix, YouTube, YouTube Music, ABC iView (that’s Australian ABC), 7plus, 9now, and SBS on Demand. That’s nice, now we just need channel 10’s app to support that to have coverage for all Australian free TV stations in the Android TV interface.

Conclusion

It’s a nice TV and it generally works well. Android is OK for TV use but far from great. It is running Android version 9, maybe a newer version of Android works better on TVs.

It’s too large for reasonable people to use in a home. I’ve seen smaller TVs used for 20 people in an office in a video conference. It’s cheap enough that most people can afford it, but it’s easier and more convenient to have something smaller and lighter.

• [1] https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-relationship

I have recently signed up for the Curiosity Stream [1] documentary site, this is designed to be like Netflix but for non-fiction content only. The service costs $US15 per annum or $52US per annum for 4K (I think the 4K service was about $US120 per annum when I signed up). The extra price for 4K seems excessive, while it is in line with the bandwidth requirements a large portion of the costs of the service would be about user support and running the service reliably for which 4K makes little difference.

My aim in subscribing was to just get a service like Netflix with new documentary content as I have watched every documentary I want to watch on Netflix (I think I’ve watched over 1000 hours of Netflix documentaries). So naturally I compare the service to Netflix and I found that it doesn’t compare well. Curiosity Stream (CS) has no button to skip the intro and has a problem with using the right arrow to skip forward (seems to only work once and then I have to use the mouse), this costs me about 30 seconds for each episode which adds up when watching documentaries at 1.5* speed. The method of controlling the viewing is a little clunky, sometimes the popup menu at the bottom of the screen to control playback doesn’t disappear by itself until you mouse over it and space bar doesn’t select pause instead it selects the last action. CS allows selecting individual episodes for your watch list instead of entire series, this could be useful for some people but I just find it annoying, it might be good for classroom use. The method of searching for new shows to watch isn’t as good as the Netflix method or the way things are displayed on Android TV (which seems to have an API for multiple video providers to show a list of shows with one row per provider). Some of these things might seem OK if you haven’t used other services, but if you are used to Netflix and Amazon Prime then it will seem clunky.

The amount of content on Curiosity Stream doesn’t seem that large, I don’t know how to get a full measure of it, but when I search for things I seem to get less results than on Netflix. That could be something to do with what I’m searching for.

In terms of value for money $US15 per annum for the content that CS provides is a good deal. Netflix overall offers better value for home users having fiction as well as non-fiction in large quantities. But for documentary content $US15 per annum is pretty cheap. I recommend signing up for CS, but for most people signing up for Netflix first will be a good option.

1. [1] https://curiositystream.com/

I’ve just bought a HP ML110 Gen9 as a personal workstation, here are my notes about it and documentation on running Debian on it.

Why a Server?

I bought this is because the ML350p Gen8 turned out to be too noisy for my taste [1]. I’ve just been editing my page about Memtest86+ RAM speeds [2], over the course of 10 years (high end laptop in 2001 to low end server in 2011) RAM speed increased by a factor of 100. RAM speed has been increasing at a lower rate than CPU speed and is becoming an increasing bottleneck on system performance. So while I could get a faster white-box system the cost of a second-hand server isn’t that great and I’m getting a system that’s 100* faster than what was adequate for most tasks in 2001.

HP makes some nice workstation class machines with ECC RAM (think server without remote management, hot-swap disks, or redundant PSU but with sound hardware). But they are significantly more expensive on the second hand market than servers.

This server cost me $650 and came with 2*480G “DC” grade SSDs (Intel but with HPE stickers). I hope that more than half of the purchase price will be recovered from selling the SSDs (I will use NVMe). Also 64G of non-ECC RAM costs $370 from my local store. As I want lots of RAM for testing software on VMs it will probably turn out that the server cost me less than the cost of new RAM once I’ve sold the SSDs!

Monitoring

wget -O /usr/local/hpePublicKey2048_key1.pub https://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/hpePublicKey2048_key1.pub
echo "# HP monitoring" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/local/hpePublicKey2048_key1.pub] http://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/downloads/MCP/Debian/ stretch/current-gen9 non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

The above commands will make the management utilities installable on Debian/Buster. If using Bullseye (Testing at the moment) then you need to have Buster repositories in APT for dependencies, HP doesn’t seem to have packaged all their utilities for Buster.

wget -r -np -A Contents-amd64.bz2 http://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/repo/mcp/debian/dists

To find out which repositories had the programs I need I ran the above recursive wget and then uncompressed them for grep -R (as an aside it would be nice if bzgrep supported -R). I installed the hp-health package which has hpasmcli for viewing and setting many configuration options and hplog for viewing event log data and thermal data (among a few other things). I’ve added a new monitor to etbemon hp-temp.monitor to monitor HP server temperatures, I haven’t made a configuration option to change the thresholds for what is considered “normal” because I don’t expect server class systems to be routinely running above the warning temperature. For the linux-temp.monitor script I added a command-line option for the percentage of the “high” temperature that is an error condition as well as an option for the number of CPU cores that need to be over-temperature, having one core permanently over the “high” temperature due to a web browser seems standard for white-box workstations nowadays.

The hp-health package depends on “libc6-i686 | lib32gcc1” even though none of the programs it contains use lib32gcc1. Depending on lib32gcc1 instead of “lib32gcc1 | lib32gcc-s1” means that installing hp-health requires removing mesa-opencl-icd which probably means that BOINC can’t use the GPU among other things. I solved this by editing /var/lib/dpkg/status and changing the package dependencies to what I desired. Note that this is not something for a novice to do, make a backup and make sure you know what you are doing!

Issues

The “HPE Dynamic Smart Array B140i” is a software RAID device. While it’s convenient for some users that software RAID gets supported in the UEFI boot process, generally software RAID is a bad idea. Also my system has hot-swap drive caddies but the controller doesn’t support hot-swap. So the first thing to do was to configure the array controller to run in AHCI mode and give up on using hot-swap drive caddies for hot-swap. I tested all the documented ways of scanning for new devices and nothing other than a reboot made the kernel recognise a new SATA disk.

According to specs provided by Dell and HP the ML110 Gen9 makes less noise than the PowerEdge T320, according to my own observations the reverse is the case. I don’t know if this is because of Dell being more conservative in their specs than HP or because of how dBA is measured vs my own personal annoyance thresholds for sounds. As the system makes more noise than I’m comfortable with I plan to build a rubber enclosure for the rear of the system to reduce noise, that will be the subject of another post. For Australian readers Bunnings has some good deals on rubber floor mats that can be used to reduce server noise.

The server doesn’t have sound hardware, while one could argue that servers don’t need sound there are some server uses for sound hardware such as using line input as a source of entropy. Also for a manufacturer it might be a benefit to use the same motherboard for workstations and servers. Fortunately a friend gave me a nice set of Logitech USB speakers a few years ago that I hadn’t previously had a cause to use, so that will solve the problem for me (I don’t need line-in on a workstation).

UEFI and Memtest

I decided to try UEFI boot for something new (in the past I’d only used UEFI boot for a server that only had large disks). In the past I’ve booted all my own systems with BIOS boot because I’m familiar with it and they all have SSDs for booting which are less than 2TB in size (until recently 2TB SSDs weren’t affordable for my personal use). The Debian UEFI wiki page is worth reading [3]. The Debian Wiki page about ProLiant servers [4] is worth reading too.

Memtest86+ doesn’t support EFI booting (just goes to a black screen) even though Debian/Buster puts in a GRUB entry for it (Debian bug #695246 was filed for this in 2012). Also on my ML110 Memtest86+ doesn’t report the RAM speed (a known issue on Memtest86+). Comments on the net say that Memtest86+ hasn’t been maintained for a long time and Memtest86 (the non-free version) has been updated more recently. So far I haven’t seen a system with ECC RAM have a memory problem that could be detected by Memtest86+, the memory problems I’ve seen on ECC systems have been things that prevent booting (RAM not being recognised correctly), that are detected by the BIOS as ECC errors before booting, or that are reported by the kernel as ECC errors at run time (happened years ago and I can’t remember the details).

Overall I’m not a fan of EFI with the way it currently works in Debian. It seems to add some of the GRUB functionality into the BIOS and then use that to load GRUB. It seems that EFI can do everything you need and it would be better to just have a single boot loader not two of them chained.

Power Supply

There are a range of PSUs for the ML110, the one I have has the smallest available PSU (350W) and doesn’t have a PCIe power cable (the one used for video cards). Here is the HP document which shows the cabling for the various ML110 Gen8 PSUs [5], I have the 350W PSU. One thing I’ve considered is whether I could make an adaptor from the drive bay power to the PCIe connector. A quick web search indicates that 4 SAS disks when active can take up to 75W more power than a system with no disks. If that’s the case then the 2 spare drive bay connectors which can each handle 4 disks should be able to supply 150W. As a 6 pin PCIe power cable (GPU power cable) is rated at 75W that should be fine in theory (here’s a page with the pinouts for PCIe power connectors [6]). My video card is a Radeon R7 260X which apparently takes about 113W all up so should be taking less than 75W from the PCIe power cable.

All I really want is YouTube, Netflix, and text editing at 4K resolution. So I don’t need much in terms of 3D power. KDE uses some of the advanced features of modern video cards, but it doesn’t compare to 3D gaming. According to the Wikipedia page for Radeon RX 500 series [7] the RX560 supports DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 (both of which do 4K@60Hz) and has a TDP of 75W. So a RX560 video card seems like a good option that will work in any system that doesn’t have a spare PCIe power cable. I’ve just ordered one of those for $246 so hopefully that will arrive in a week or so.

PCI Fan

The ML110 Gen9 has an “optional” PCIe “fan and baffle” to cool PCIe cards (part number 784580-B21). Extra cooling of PCIe cards is a good thing, but $400 list price (and about $50 ebay price) for the fan and baffle is unpleasant. When I boot the system with a PCIe dual-ethernet card and two PCIe NVMe cards it gives a BIOS warning on boot, when I add a video card it refuses to boot without the extra fan. It’s nice that the system makes sure it doesn’t get into a thermal overload situation, but it would be nicer if they just shipped all necessary fans with it instead of trying to get more money out of customers. I just bought a PCI fan and baffle kit for $60.

Conclusion

In spite of the unexpected expense of a new video card and PCI fan the overall cost of this system is still low, particularly when considering that I’ll find another use for the video card which needs and extra power connector.

It is disappointing that HP didn’t supply a more capable PSU and fit all the fans to all models, the expectation of a server is that you can just do server stuff not have to buy extra bits before you can do server stuff. If you want to install Tesla GPUs or something then it’s expected that you might need to do something unusual with a server, but the basic stuff should just work. A single processor tower server should be designed to function as a deskside workstation and be able to handle an average video card.

Generally it’s a nice computer, I look forward to getting the next deliveries of parts so I can make it work properly.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2021/04/22/hp-ml350p-gen8/
• [2] https://doc.coker.com.au/computers/ram-speed-memtest86/
• [3] https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI
• [4] https://wiki.debian.org/HP/ProLiant
• [5] https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=c05054092
• [6] https://www.moddiy.com/pages/Power-Supply-Connectors-and-Pinouts.html

I’ve been watching the show Riverdale on Netflix recently. It’s an interesting modern take on the Archie comics. Having watched Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space when I was younger I was anticipating something aimed towards a similar audience. As solving mysteries and crimes was apparently a major theme of the show I anticipated something along similar lines to Scooby Doo, some suspense and some spooky things, but then a happy ending where criminals get arrested and no-one gets hurt or killed while the vast majority of people are nice. Instead the first episode has a teen being murdered and Ms Grundy being obsessed with 15yo boys and sleeping with Archie (who’s supposed to be 15 but played by a 20yo actor).

Everyone in the show has some dark secret. The filming has a dark theme, the sky is usually overcast and it’s generally gloomy. This is a significant contrast to Veronica Mars which has some similarities in having a young cast, a sassy female sleuth, and some similar plot elements. Veronica Mars has a bright theme and a significant comedy element in spite of dealing with some dark issues (murder, rape, child sex abuse, and more). But Riverdale is just dark. Anyone who watches this with their kids expecting something like Scooby Doo is in for a big surprise.

There are lots of interesting stylistic elements in the show. Lots of clothing and uniform designs that seem to date from the 1940’s. It seems like some alternate universe where kids have smartphones and laptops while dressing in the style of the 1940s. One thing that annoyed me was construction workers using tools like sledge-hammers instead of excavators. A society that has smart phones but no earth-moving equipment isn’t plausible.

On the upside there is a racial mix in the show that more accurately reflects American society than the original Archie comics and homophobia is much less common than in most parts of our society. For both race issues and gay/lesbian issues the show treats them in an accurate way (portraying some bigotry) while the main characters aren’t racist or homophobic.

I think it’s generally an OK show and recommend it to people who want a dark show. It’s a good show to watch while doing something on a laptop so you can check Wikipedia for the references to 1940s stuff (like when Bikinis were invented). I’m half way through season 3 which isn’t as good as the first 2, I don’t know if it will get better later in the season or whether I should have stopped after season 2.

I don’t usually review fiction, but the interesting aesthetics of the show made it deserve a review.

For a while I’ve had a problem with my Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 1 [1] where storage pauses for 30 seconds, it’s become more common recently and unfortunately everything seems to depend on storage (ideally a web browser playing a video from the Internet could keep doing so with no disk access, but that’s not what happens).

echo 3 > /sys/block/sda/device/timeout

I’ve put the above in /etc/rc.local which should make it only take 3 seconds to recover from storage problems instead of 30 seconds, the problem hasn’t recurred since that change so I don’t know if it works as desired. The Thinkpad is running BTRFS and no data is reported as being lost, so it’s not a problem to use it at this time.

The bottom of this post has an example of the errors I’m getting. A friend said that his searches for such errors shows people claiming that it’s a “SATA controller or cable” problem, which for a SATA device bolted directly to the motherboard means it’s likely to be a motherboard problem (IE more expensive to fix than the $289 I paid for the laptop almost 3 years ago).

A Lenovo forum discussion says that the X1 Carbon Gen1 uses an unusual connector that’s not M.2 SATA and not mSATA [2]. This means that a replacement is going to be expensive, $100US for a replacement from eBay when a M.2 SATA or NVMe device would cost about $50AU from my local store. It also means that I can’t use a replacement for anything else. If my laptop took a regular NVMe I’d buy one and test it out, if it didn’t solve the problem a spare NVMe device is always handy to have. But I’m not interested in spending $100US for a part that may turn out to be useless.

I bought the laptop expecting that there was nothing I could fix inside it. While it is theoretically possible to upgrade the CPU etc in a laptop most people find that the effort and expense makes it better to just replace the entire laptop. With the ultra light category of laptops the RAM is soldered on the motherboard and there are even less options for replacing things. So while it’s annoying that Lenovo didn’t use a standard interface for this device (they did so for other models in the range) it’s not a situation that I hadn’t expected.

Now the question is what to do next. The Thinkpad has a SD socket and micro SD cards are getting large capacities nowadays. If it won’t boot from a SD card I could boot from USB and then run from SD. So even if the internal SATA device fails entirely it should still be useful. I wonder if I could find a Thinkpad with a similar problem going cheap as I’m pretty sure that a Windows user couldn’t make any storage device usable the way I can with Linux.

I’ve looked at prices on auction sites but haven’t seen a Thinkpad X1 Carbon going for anywhere near the price I got this one. The nearest I’ve seen is around $350 for a laptop with significant damage.

While I am a little unhappy at Lenovo’s choice of interface, I’ve definitely got a lot more than $289 of value out of this laptop. So I’m not really complaining.

[315041.837612] ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
[315041.837613] ata1.00: failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
[315041.837616] ata1.00: cmd 61/20:48:28:1e:3e/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 9 ncq dma 
16384 out
                         res 40/00:01:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x4 
(timeout)                
[315041.837617] ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
[315041.837618] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[315041.837621] ata1.00: cmd 60/08:50:e0:26:84/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 10 ncq 
dma 4096 in
                         res 40/00:01:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x4 
(timeout)                
[315041.837622] ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
[315041.837625] ata1: hard resetting link
[315042.151781] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
[315042.163368] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/02:00:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) 
succeeded
[315042.163370] ata1.00: ACPI cmd f5/00:00:00:00:00:a0 (SECURITY FREEZE LOCK) 
filtered out
[315042.163372] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/10:03:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) filtered 
out
[315042.183332] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/02:00:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) 
succeeded
[315042.183334] ata1.00: ACPI cmd f5/00:00:00:00:00:a0 (SECURITY FREEZE LOCK) 
filtered out
[315042.183336] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/10:03:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) filtered 
out
[315042.193332] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
[315042.193789] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#10 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK 
driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[315042.193791] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#10 Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] 
[315042.193793] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#10 Add. Sense: Unaligned write command
[315042.193795] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#10 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 00 84 26 e0 00 00 
08 00
[315042.193797] print_req_error: I/O error, dev sda, sector 8660704
[315042.193810] ata1: EH complete

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2018/02/08/thinkpad-x1-carbon/
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/y7bsjarz

It’s been over 6 years since my last post comparing 3G data plans in Australia.

I’m currently using Aldi Mobile [1]. They have a $15 package which gives 3G of data and unlimited calls and SMS in Australia for 30 days, and a $25 package that gives 20G of data and unlimited international calls to 15 unspecified countries (presumably the US and much of the EU). It’s on the Telstra network so has good access all around Australia. I’m on the grandfathered $20 per 30 days plan which gives me more than 3G of data (not sure how much but I need more than 3G) while costing less than the current offer of $25.

In the above table I put Aldi at the top because Telstra has the best network. If you want to use a mobile phone anywhere in Australia then Telstra is the best choice. If you only care about city areas then the other networks are usually good enough. The rest of the services are in order of price, cheapest first. For every service I only mentioned the offerings that are price competitive.

I didn’t list the offerings that are larger than these. There are offerings of 300G/year or more, but most people don’t need them. Every service in this table has more expensive offerings with more data.

Please inform me in the comments of any services I missed.

• [1] https://www.aldimobile.com.au
• [2] https://www.dodo.com/mobile
• [3] https://moosemobile.com.au
• [4] https://www.amaysim.com.au
• [5] https://www.koganmobile.com.au