Computing resources optimisation [1E]

Got to thinking more about how to make the best use of resources with the computers. The biggest issue is ergonomics. You can only really practically use two keyboards at a time. So if using more than two computers you prefer to have more than two keyboards/mice, but it's hard to access them without moving your chair, unless you can use VNC. At the moment I have a love/hate relationship with VNC because I haven't been able to make it run as a service on any of my Linux computers and therefore work out of the box every time. Also X11vnc is less than reliable and crashes quite frequently.

In terms of the two computers that are most frequently used, the serverpc that only has 16 GB of RAM should be boosted to 32 GB at some point, probably with a new mainboard, and its existing mainboard gets moved into mediapc, which in turn its board gets moved into the 4th computer. The main issue with running lots of applications on a 32 GB computer is when one of them causes it to crash. I'm still looking at the optimum way to use the 3rd or 4th computer to run some stuff such as email and spread the load of map resources onto the 2nd computer so it isn't all the 1st computer, but it's a tricky process to try to work out the best way of making that happen. I think it will be necessary to focus mainly on the two computers with the keyboards that are easiest to reach that will run virtually everything, so mediapc will stay media and ministrypc will stay ministry.

Running the day to day stuff in a VM on mainpc is a possibility. We are looking at what is internet based and doesn't have issues with local resource access. It's possible I may put email onto mediapc and possibly some other resources because it isn't used for that much and occasional access via its own keyboard, which can also be switched onto one of the main keyboards, is viable. This is different from using it for image display, which is what I have already experimented with, which often runs into problems getting updates from mainpc over the network. Internet based stuff like email doesn't have that limitation.

So probably the next goal is to get serverpc up to 32 GB, there is quite a bit of cost to this so it would end up happening in stages. Of course, I presently have no budget for this, so really it is a dream for the present. We just keep working with our current resources for now. If I can make VNC work properly on mediapc then it will be easier to do stuff on that which I find hard to use it for at the moment. However doing the new board for serverpc and putting its board into mediapc would also help because mediapc would have enough resources to run more stuff and over VNC it would be very good because I am using VNC to control the screen, which is still being displayed, unlike RDP where the screen turns off. 

I will have another look at VNC support for Debian and do some testing with tightvnc as it seems I should be able to make this work and then mediapc in particular can be used for more things.

New bits for "old" computers [11]

After looking yet again (as I must have already done hundreds of times) at where I could put a fourth keyboard on the desk, I cut up a spare piece of melamine shelf and then screwed it to the desk top on the left hand side and that is where the Win10PC's keyboard and mouse now sit. Whereas last time I was going to adapt the keyboard slide on the LHS which I currently use for my drinking cup etc, and got as far as cutting another melamine shelf to the extra width, I am now proceeding with this solution. Although the keyboard is further away this way than is desirable, I have also installed TightVNCserver on the computer and can use Remmina to connect to it from MainPC to make use of it more convenient without having to switch one of the two switchable keyboards to the Windows computer. We have to use VNC because Windows 10 Home Edition does not support RDP. 

I have been editing aerial photo collections in Qgis again and have now come up with a way to script from a QLR file to copy files automatically from a collection. The manual steps are:

1. Open the QLR file in Notepad++ on Win10pc
2. Extract all the <layername> lines by using a Find in Open File command
3. Replace the XML tags with blanks to convert this to just a list of files
4. Save this as a text file
5. Run a simple Powershell script using Get-Content to read the file names from the file and then use Copy-Item to copy all the files from a source folder to a destination folder.

As time goes on I may well use Select-XML to directly convert the XML from the QLR file to a filename and copy as is, the tricky part is to be able to convert paths with forward slashes in them to backslashes and so forth, so in this case the Powershell script has hardcoded paths in it. Works like a charm and, as usual, is saving a lot of disk space. In the most recent case only about 20% of the files (0.1 m Dunedin suburban area) are actually needed and the result is about 10 GB disk space saved.

I still haven't got onto the backup solution but I plan on doing some testing over the next couple of days as I really do need to get this happening.

New bits for "old" computers [10]

As I detailed recently I have changed my desk layout to allow four keyboards to be used easily and have also changed the screen layout to suit. I had four wireless keyboards to make this happen. Unfortunately the MS multimedia keyboard I use with the win10pc has gone wonky and having go slows and keys randomly sticking and repeating so that has gone in the rubbish.

Since it is hard to get enough different wireless keyboards and especially multimedia keyboards for my layout I have decided not to bother with replacing it. Instead the left hand keyboard slide (the one where I often have drinking cups/glasses) will be adapted to become wider and deeper so it can double as a storage/usage location for the Genius mini USB keyboard I have. This will be used with a regular wireless mouse for the relatively small amount of time that I need to use this setup, since I can always switch one of the two main keyboards to this computer. 

The regular backups will be started this weekend. serverpc will in fact act as a server for all the computers but they will each have their own repo, which for mainpc will be on one particular 2 TB backup disk, while serverpc and mediapc will have a repo each on a shared 2 TB disk. Alternatively I may stick with a disk for each computer, so as to have spares, the main issue being not enough disks at the moment. This arrangement is preferred because serverpc can be easily shut down to change disks without disrupting things as can happen with disks having to be inserted in the removable bay and brought online.

The amount of disk space on mainpc for a complete set of aerial photos for a rail corridor 235 km long has turned out to be about 2.4 GB. This is very good so the required files can be kept on mainpc with the rest of the map project files, serverpc will be used to store the bulk downloads before the images actually needed are selected. So I am budgeting on having 100 GB of disk space used on mainpc for all the maps which is quite reasonable with its disk capacity at present.

The living room is getting a makeover at present to optimise all the things I do in here and a lot of stuff that doesn't need to be in here will get stored "temporarily" in the bedroom until I get that properly tidied up, as I need to make the living room the daytime space for everything to save on winter heating costs, using the aircon to make the room temp 16-17 degrees and wearing a few layers of clothes to avoid having to heat the room more than that.