'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

The first part of the long-overdue computer rebuild posts!

Back in May, I finally brought my desktop kicking and screaming into the current decade. Nyx was originally built (as Khaos) in 2007 and the core of it has changed very little over the years - there's been a few incremental upgrades here and there, but it still ran the same Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor that it started out with. It's held up surprisingly well over the years and still had enough grunt for daily use and light gaming, but the time has finally come to replace it... (pleaseremove has noted that I keep old hardware going for much longer than anyone should)

For reference, the original core of Khaos was:

Motherboard: ASUS P5K-E WiFi (Intel P35 chipset)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (G0 stepping)
RAM: 2x Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C4 TwinX kits (4GB overall across 4 sticks)
GPU: Inno3D GeForce 8800 GT
HDDs: 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB SATA-II

There's a story behind the set of parts: I picked the Q6600 because it was the CPU to get at the time and managed to get the lower-power stepping, the motherboard because it had three PCI slots and I had three cards I wanted to use (TV card, SCSI card (for a film scanner), IDE card (the motherboard only had a single IDE channel and I had older drives I wanted to include)), and the GPU solely because it was the only single-slot two-output one on the market. It was only much later that I realised I'd unexpectedly picked a top-tier GPU - when the 8800 GT was released, it outperformed everything bar nVidia's crazy expensive flagship and did so for under £200 in a mere 125W TDP. Looking back at reviews, the general consensus was it instantly obsoleted everything else on the market.

Anyway, by the time Nyx (renamed after upgrading from Windows XP to 7) was decommissioned the major components were:

Motherboard: ASUS P5K-E WiFi (Intel P35 chipset)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (G0 stepping)
RAM: 1x Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C4 TwinX kit, plus 2x generic 2GB DDR2 (6GB overall across 4 sticks)
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 950 FTW
SSD: Plextor PX-256 M5S 256GB SATA-III
HDDs: 3x Toshiba PC P300 3TB SATA-III

The GPU upgrade came about because the 8800 GT finally failed, and by this point I'd removed the IDE HDDs and corresponding IDE card and could fit a two-slot card. Not that I had much choice - the GPU market had entirely settled on twin-slot coolers for anything halfway decent even if they weren't always necessary - and after a bit of research I picked a GeForce GTX 950 as sitting in the sweet spot for performance. It does look rather silly with an enormous twin-fan heatsink on it as it's only rated for 90W TDP. The SSD was bought after the speed wars of early SATA drives had died down and was one of the first that could saturate a SATA-III bus all day long without cheating with compression. And the HDDs... well, the original drives had been upgraded to a pair of 2TB drives, and then one of those failed so I replaced all the myriad HDDs in the system with a ridiculous 9TB of storage.

Finally, it's time for the new system! The core of the build consists of:

Motherboard: ASUS TUF Gaming X570-Pro
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
RAM: Crucial Ballistix 3600 CL16 2x16GB (32GB overall across 2 sticks)
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 950 FTW
Primary SSD: WD Black SN850 1TB
Secondary SSDs: 2x WD Blue 1TB

Unlike the original build I had fewer criteria when building it: AMD Zen 3 architecture (because by pretty much any metric they stomp current Intel CPUs), X570 chipset, and onboard 802.11ax 2x2 WiFi. The TUF Gaming seemed like a sensible choice - higher end boards seemed to me to result in diminishing returns and one trick of the TUF Gaming is there's few constraints on which combination of slots can be used. RAM was picked at the highest clock speed that Ryzen CPUs can reliably run 1:1 with and this particular set is lower latency than most. For storage, I had originally planned on getting a Samsung NVMe drive but by the time I finally went for the upgrade the new WD Black had appeared to flatten everything in benchmarks. GPU aside (reused from Nyx), this is not a slow computer.

And while I was putting the final specification together, I decided to treat myself. You might have noticed there's no HDDs in the list - yup, I went pure SSD for this build as my network is fast enough to use the NAS for bulk storage. I also picked a Noctua NH-C14S CPU heatsink (which easily handles the 140W power draw of a fully loaded Ryzen 9) and as the final treat I swapped out all the case fans for a set of Noctua NF-A8's. The result is when idle, the new computer is silent, and even under full load it's quieter than Nyx ever was.

The Nyx replacement build has been in the planning for a long time. It was originally pencilled in for late 2019, and looking at my notes would have likely been a Ryzen 7 3800X build. It got deferred several times, at first because before I upgrade Nyx I want to put together a Kodi system on my Raspberry Pi (because Microsoft killed off Windows Media Center). Then because AMD announced a slightly shinier Zen 2 processor and I wanted to see if the 3800XT was worth it (reviews suggest not really). Then because I had to sort out the NAS replacement (because Firefox killed off TLS 1.0 support). Then because AMD announced even shinier Zen 3 processors and the entire computing world went bonkers over them.

I had all but settled on buying a lowly Ryzen 5 3600X as a stop-gap solution until Zen 3 was stocked again - and while the Ryzen 7's have been available for a while, what I really wanted was a Ryzen 9 5900X and those had only just started to trickle back onto the market at silly prices (£800? No thanks!). So I was gradually finalising the spec and was probably going to buy a 3600X in the next couple of weeks... then pleaseremove messaged me yesterday morning with news of a surprise stock update at an only slightly silly price. One quick order later, and this appeared today (on a Sunday, no less!)...



Now I just need to order the rest of the parts! My challenge is to build a system that outperforms pleaseremove's new monstrosity in at least one PerformanceTest category (and probably only in one - I reckon disk is the only one I've got a chance at given what's in his system!).

pleaseremove: I need commission... That's two 5900x's I have sold scan this morning

Upgrade time! Meet Caerus:



For about a year now I've been mulling over various computer upgrades - the first of these was buying the laptop just over a year ago. But that was only step one on the grand plan to upgrade all the things, and now the next steps have happened.

As with many things there was a particular trigger for it, and in this case it was my browser refusing to talk to Athena (a ReadyNAS Duo V1) because it only speaks TLS 1.0 and the browser makers have all decided that TLS 1.0 is completely broken and cannot be used anywhere. Nevermind that this is a local network and the NAS admin page is not exposed to the internet...

Anyway given that Athena was a decade old, it was long overdue an upgrade to something a bit faster. And after much pondering, I settled on a shiny new Synology DS920+! It slots neatly into the shelves that make up the comms tower in this flat and is a fair bit beefier - it's got a quad-core 2.7GHz Celeron J4125 with 4GB RAM, against the single-core Sparc chip and 256MB RAM in the old unit. This will help with other plans to turn it into more than just a NAS.

Setting it up was straightforward: power it up, feed it a drive (a spare 3TB one that used to live in Nyx), wait a bit while it installs DiskStation Manager, and then start configuring! The Synology software is a lot more capable than the ReadyNAS RAIDiator firmware and I can see I'll have lots of fun getting it tweaked just how I want... but in the meantime, the immediate challenge was to migrate from Athena .

My end goal is to load out Caerus with 4x3TB drives, probably as a pair of RAID-1 arrays (RAID-5 is just asking for trouble these days once you get past a few TB per drive, and RAID-6 with only 4 bays doesn't have any benefit over RAID-1 or RAID-10). I do have the drives, but there's one small problem with it: three of them are currently in Nyx (the desktop) and won't be removed until that gets upgraded. So as a stop-gap I'll reuse the 2x2TB drives from Athena, but those have data I want on them and the ReadyNAS RAID format is different.

So, my cunning plan to migrate without losing redundancy is this:
1. Fit the initial 3TB drive in Caerus, and configure it as a single-drive SHR volume
2. Copy everything from Athena to Caerus
3. Move one 2TB drive from Athena to Caerus, and configure that as a second single-drive SHR volume
4. Within Caerus, copy everything from the 3TB volume to the 2TB volume.
5. Move the second 2TB drive (decommissioning Athena), and expand the second SHR volume onto it (which will turn it into a RAID-1 array)

Carrying that out was mostly straightforward, apart from step 2: I couldn't find any commands in DSM that would pull data from another location (there's plenty of backup options but they're all based around backing up this NAS to somewhere else, or working in combination with client software). So instead I created a backup job on Athena to push the entire volume across (over NFS, because I couldn't get the rsync connection to work) and left that to run overnight. Everything else went as expected, including Athena emailing me when I pulled the first disk (good to know that works!) and the copies within Caerus, and now I have 5TB of partly-redundant storage and a whole pile of addons to play with. I have plans for Caerus...

Well, The Pi Hut has a guide to configuring the TV Hat that looks fairly straightforward so let's crack on with it. I'm noting down the steps here because the Internet is fickle and likes to eat useful webpages.

( TV Hat time )

Well, the network bridging went horribly wrong - Windows decided to use a common MAC address for all packets forwarded via the bridge, and the Netgear router in turn decided to hand out the same IP address both to Nyx and to the Raspberry Pi.

Neither was particularly impressed by this. Windows at least showed a warning message, but the Pi appeared to just sulk in the corner and not boot.

Anyway, I've changed to Windows' Internet Connection Sharing and that works much better - I can now SSH into the Pi (though I did have to change the Pi's DNS server - it seems that Windows isn't running a resolver). And trawling through the logs shows that it does at least detect the WiFi adapter:

[    2.603361] usb 1-1.3: new high-speed USB device number 4 using dwc_otg
[    2.734558] usb 1-1.3: New USB device found, idVendor=2357, idProduct=011e, bcdDevice= 2.00
[    2.734583] usb 1-1.3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[    2.734596] usb 1-1.3: Product: 802.11ac WLAN Adapter
[    2.734610] usb 1-1.3: Manufacturer: Realtek
[    2.734622] usb 1-1.3: SerialNumber: 00e04c000001

( More WiFi shenanigans )

A replacement laptop has been something I've looked into off and on for a few years now, but never quite could justify to myself as long as Aether was approximately functional. Last year however Aether finally died for good (GPU failure) and since then I've found the odd instance when having a laptop would have been handy. So with a potential upgrade for Nyx looming in the next few months (which will be another post) I went laptop hunting as I'd rather like to have at least one working computer.

Ironically, I bought the laptop just before the Grand Disk Failure of 2019... but not far enough in advance to have it arrive first.

Anyway, meet Alethia!



I've always been partial to ThinkPads (even if they no longer have the nice keyboards of old). In years gone by I'd have likely picked a T-series, but quite frankly they no longer have the features I want (DVD drive) and in the absence of those, the extra size isn't really necessary. I started looking at other models, and the X-series caught my eye with the Yoga variants in particular. And the result: a fairly tricked-out X390 Yoga! Being an X-series there are compromises - very little is upgradable on them, so I maxed out the RAM at 16GB and picked a Core i7-8565U processor.

With any luck, this will be another long-lasting system. I got well over 10 years out of Aether in all its forms - if I get 5 years with this one, then I'll be happy.

The only question left is how fast is it?



The answer is... fast. It's not the best-scoring system overall on pleaseremove's list but it does manage to hold its own, given the mobile CPU and embedded GPU (Intel UHD 620). And it has a secret weapon, in the form of an upgraded SSD - I replaced the stock drive (a 128GB Toshiba BG3-series model) with a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus which has utterly demolished all the competition on that list.

Computer hard drive: *snicker-snack! snicker-snack! snicker-snack!*
boggyb: eh?
Computer hard drive: I AM ERROR

Well that's most annoying. The data drive in Nyx has failed (which is unusual for me, normally it's the backup drive that goes). I had some inkling of it earlier today but thought no, it'll last long enough for me to order a replacement - but it apparently took offence to a RAM upgrade I did this evening and is now sulking and refusing to talk to anything.

Fortunately my data is backed up - this is far from my first time picking up the pieces of a broken computer and I should be out maybe a day's worth of changes. Unfortunately that drive was also home to a fair amount of other stuff not backed up due to size. It's all replaceable, just annoying to have to go through and find again...

Work on Hemera (the laptop) is progressing - I'm slowly tracking down the various ThinkPad utilities that go with it. It's not helped by Lenovo dropping support in later versions, and really not helped by the blatant lies in some of the release notes of versions that falsely claim support. Still, I'm getting there.

Another challenge was getting Windows Update to run. There seems to be some glitch where trying to run an update on a freshly-installed Windows 7 SP1 system never manages to find any updates, but gets stuck with svchost.exe chewing CPU. Searching online generally resulted in a mix of "how to repair windows update" and "how to install the latest update client" suggestions (neither of which fixed it), but eventually I stumbled across this forum thread which gave a fix in the form of manually installing a couple of updates.

I'm not sure how much of this was needed, but it was only after manually installing all of the following that Windows Update finally did what it was meant to do and found some updates:

• KB3050265: Windows Update Client for Windows 7: June 2015
• KB3065987: Windows Update Client for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2: July 2015
• KB3083324: Windows Update Client for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2: September 2015
• Fixit 50123: Windows Update troubleshooter
• KB3060716: MS15-090: Vulnerabilities in Windows could allow elevation of privilege: August 11, 2015
• KB3087039: MS15-097: Description of the security update for the graphics component in Windows: September 8, 2015

It still took ages to run - Microsoft could do with releasing another service pack or a security rollup for Windows 7.

Today's discovery is that Remote Desktop can do printer redirection. Setting it up is slightly complicated since just enabling printer sharing on the client isn't quite enough - you also have to have previously installed the printer driver on the computer you're connecting to (unlike normal printer sharing, remote desktop doesn't seem to be able to download the driver automatically from the computer with the printer), but once installed it just works. Neat!