General update

Since last time I have been doing a lot of setup stuff with various computers.

Win10PC is gradually getting set up, the only stuff I really need it for is a handful of things like downloading gigabytes of maps or whatever, scanning, ripping DVDs and bulk Irfanview stuff so it isn't moving along very fast but it is what will get used when I want to view charts with the keyboard as the screen is set up vertically for that, and having VNC running on it means I can do just about everything from over here at my desk without having to change seats. At the moment I still have to get the scanner and printer hooked up to it (well probably only the scanner because the printer can go onto mainpc). Unfortunately the storage spaces thingy doesn't actually work the way the RAID mirroring used to work (it only works with full disks, not partitions) so RAID won't be possible but I can move the home drive to the second disk and that is how I will set it up. There won't actually be anything on it that matters anyhow because of the limited tasks it is used for.

serverpc is going very well after getting its disk capacity boosted last week as I had to restore the home volume after backing it up as that was the easiest way to restore it without having to leave one of the old disks inside it, putting the backup disk into the removable drive bay is easier. I took the opportunity to dump all the config files especially as some of them didn't get backed up properly and wouldn't restore, which hasn't really been a big problem for restoring. The main task at the moment is to get all the backups of the other computers working again as with the reinstallations they all need stuff put back on them to make the backups over the network function correctly.

mediapc has also been reinstalled. I had put Xubuntu on it because it has better stuff for working with phones and things, but the biggest issue is with Cosmic, maybe because it is a beta or maybe not, that I just could not get it to hibernate. In the past it didn't matter if it could hibernate or not, but with the different uses I am putting this computer to, I need to be able to save the session and come back to it. On Ubuntu hibernation is disabled by default and even when it was supposedly enabled and the hibernate button was present and did something when you clicked it, the computer was actually turning off instead of hibernating. So I decided the simple answer was to put Debian 9.5 on it, but I failed to notice that the second screen would turn itself off (just a little side effect of having a TV as a screen and it has a no signal turnoff timer that can't be disabled) and then the logon greeter (the Linux name for the logon screen, which in MS parlance is called the Winlogon) tried to come up on the TV because it was still detectable (soft off and hard off are different because in soft off the display can still be detected). So after a lot of installation attempts that were seemly failing I just moved the mouse accidentally at the end of yet another attempt and the mouse comes back onto the active display and there is the greeter. So I was able to install 9.5 out of the box after all. I configured the spare SSD partitition as /tmp and lost some stuff I had downloaded onto it, but I will be able to download that stuff again.

bedroompc is working well with the network cable in place to be used for VNC and other non-internet networking (so grsync can run real fast) so that it can work well for internet connectivity via a tethered phone when the normal internet I have is off. I have used it quite a lot for this purpose, but still have a lot of data left at the the moment.

pc4 (for want of a better name) has Buster Alpha 3 running on it and I synced down the entire copy of my media library from bedroompc while I was reinstalling mediapc, this happened very fast over the cable. So I played media on it while I was working on mediapc with the various install issues that had that meant what should have been a simple install took about three days to complete.

And of course mainpc just toodled along like usual but I am still finishing off setup having reinstalled it not so long ago. I will set up the spare SSD partition as /tmp on both this computer and serverpc. So that's coming to the end of the productive window of today, when I will soon break for tea and then move onto other things for the evening. 

Windows sucks part 139 [2]

So I am changing my Windows 10 box from being inside a desktop chassis into the Antec Mini-ITX chassis with a Gigabyte GA-E350 WIN8 mainboard and as I have no real need of this computer chassis for any other purpose for the foreseeable future this is going back to being what the Windows 10 computer is going to run in, as it was some months ago. The location where it is at is about two metres from the scanner but that is the only device that will need a longer cable and there are not going to be any issues running the scanner's cable or any other cables. As is currently the case the computer will have its own speakers and screen. At present that desktop chassis, which is a mini tower Inwin chassis (smaller than the other three computers on this desk which have Inwin mid tower chassis), will remain connected to the two KVMs and therefore the two main keyboards and mice that I have on my dual stacked keyboard slides under the desk, but the Antec will not be connected to these KVMs, which means it will have its own independent keyboard and mouse, and instead it will be remote controlled using TightVNC server on the Windows 10 computer and Remmina on mainpc as the VNC client. VNC is needed because MS has omitted Remote Desktop from Windows 10 home edition. I have discovered that VNC can be connected as soon as Windows 10 is up to the lock screen so I can log the computer in remotely and there is almost no need to actually sit physically in front of the computer at all.

Another configuration issue is whether I can use a RAID-1 array in the Windows 10 Home computer as I have used in the past when Enterprise or Pro was the operating system of choice. It turns out the old mirrored option in Disk Management has been deprecated in Home edition, but is still available in Pro or Ent. However, MS is migrating to Storage Spaces to achieve the same thing as the mirrored option, and Storage Spaces is available on Home edition. Essentially I will create a 128 GB system partition onto one of the disks and the rest of the disk will be available for the storage pool. The second disk will also be in the storage pool and they will be mirrored. The existing home folder path will be moved into the storage pool by using a NTFS junction on the system volume in my profile path. This is basically the only supported way that you can move your home drive to another partition or disk because MS still won't support changing the registry key path that points to C:\Users. It is a limitation that you end up having to put in a junction for every user but is OK where there is only one user on the computer.

I looked back at my notes and saw I moved the Windows 10 computer last November or about 8 months ago from the mini tower to the Antec and then only five months ago I moved it from the Antec to the mini tower and now it goes back to the Antec which I have no further use for in the foreseeable future. I did enjoy building that Antec as a mini ITX chassis and did seriously look into upgrading it with a new Asrock board. However the only type of board that would be worthwhile is one that has a built in CPU because they are optimised for very low power and for various reasons the NUC won out as the preferred option and I got one of them instead. I have two of these Gigabyte E350 boards in case the one in the Antec chassis blows up so I can keep using the Windows computer with them. Many mini ITX boards these days are just small ATX boards that use a lot of power and aren't suitable for the likes of the Antec chassis which has only a 90 watt power supply so the upgrade route is one I have decided not to follow. Neither do I now have any need of any type of portable computer or server that I could use the Antec for so I am just sticking it with this Windows 10 home computer. 

Last time I changed formats I was able to use CloneZilla to move the Windows 10 installation between disks, unfortunately that was not possible this time. Although I have changed the Windows 10 computer 3 times, the first time I changed from Windows 10 enterprise on a no-longer-valid volume license to Windows 10 home and the second time I used Clonezilla to move the disk. This third time Clonezilla was not only unable to move the disk to another physical disk, it also somehow corrupted the existing disk so that it would not even boot and the main data partition was unreadable. It did not matter as there was no data on it that needed to be backed up so it just means a little more work setting it up from scratch. But that in itself is not much as I do not need to reinstall the camera download software, really it is just some multimedia software and the scanner software that I have to put back on it.

I wrote recently about the Vodem problems and how I would overcome them. Using the wireless bridge over a network cable has worked successfully but the issue is it will work on the whole of my network and I want to be able to limit to just one computer at a time to control how much data is going to be sucked off the cellular connection. So the alternative option is to add a wireless capability to one of the desktops to enable it to be used with the tethered phone or I can use the NUC with its built in wireless, but the NUC will need to have a cable connected to it so that I can remote to it with VNC at the same time as it is connecting to the phone.

I have completed moving things around and plugging things back in and now it is just the job of finishing the setup of everything and some of this is happening around other changes in the home environment so that is how things are going together at present.

Windows sucks part 139

Well I have written numerous times about how bad Windows is but Microsoft just keeps on proving me correct over and over. Windows 10 is probably the worst version of Windows ever released, and that's even without taking into account MS trying to force everyone to convert to it. I didn't get my edition of Windows 10 as a free upgrade, I purchased a retail edition and paid full price for it (well, a discounted wholesale price but still fully valid). And it's just so so obvious how MS has turned it into a big advertising and money grabbing platform and that is a huge shift from Windows 7 and even 8/8.1.

Now while Linux has its moments and is not totally perfect, compared to what MS has done with a huge paid team, the Linux community with its completely open source development process and hundreds or thousands of unpaid volumteers and a handful of paid developers has moved many mountains to produce something that in my view is every bit as good as Windows, in fact for many uses better, and all completely free of charge. And that is why it is the case that pretty soon, all four computers on my desk will be running Linux.

In the last year or so I went from having a brand new computer with 8 GB of RAM dedicated to Windows 10, to having the Antec E350 dedicated to Windows 10, to another desktop chassis with an E350 motherboard dedicated to Windows 10, and now Win10PC is about to go back onto that Antec E350  again and it will be the 5th computer and the only one that is not connected to the KVMs and actually sitting on this desk because I can remote control it via VNC from mainpc. So the computer will soon be off to one side and mounted under the side table that the musical keyboard sits on. It will still be used for a few things like software that I can't be bothered trying to replace at the moment like Irfanview that is hard to run under WINE. 

But we are getting so so so close to the point now that I could almost run Windows in a virtual machine because all of the hardware reasons I needed a Windows computer have largely fallen by the wayside.The single issue that has most torpedoed my faith in Windows 10 in the last few months has been over USB connection issues. I have several digital cameras and phones that I try to connect to the Windows 10 computer to upload music or download photos. The problem with downloading in particular is endless and nonsensical interruptions and error messages that we just never used to see in Windows 7. So the latest indignity was trying to download photos from my Galaxy J2 and the messages about data being in the wrong format or the device attached to the system has stopped functioning and so forth. When it was my EOS M100 camera it woud keep interrupting downloads especially large videos that would never complete, they would stop after 5 minutes.

If I plug these devices into mainpc I can get the stuff straight off them, not only is it a lot faster to download but there are no silly errors. There is still however one puzzle that is the Nexus 5X that I have not been able to get to connect to anything however. About the best I can possibly hope for is that it might be possible to download a few files at a time using Bluetooth. So that is where I stand at the moment with the Windows 10 computer, that its boot disk will soon be ghosted back onto the Antec with its laptop hard drives and become something that really only gets switched on quite occasionally.

At the same time as having all this trouble with the Windows box I have been having a lot of trouble with my Vodem, which has been a backup device I have used during internet outages and at times when I needed to work around the filtering on the internet connection I have. Working around isn't something I actually do a lot of and normally it is only happening when I need to use FTP as its port is blocked by filtering. The only time I use FTP these days is to maintain the NZ Rail Maps website at nzrailmaps.nz, which has an update backlog at present but is a low maintenance site in general. The vodem has basically stopped working properly. I don't know why this is but when I took the SIM out of it and put that SIM into a spare phone there was no limitation on internet access. I have concluded therefore for being able to use this as a backup internet connection which is hopefully not too often but as I have a large data allowance on my mobile plan, is not too much of a struggle for occasional use. This will have to be achieved by tethering to the phone that has the SIM in it, and in practice either I use a plug in wireless adapter on a computer or a wireless bridge to connect to this new wireless network. Linux has this great advantage over Windows that there won't be heaps of things running in the background that will suck up all your data when running on a metered connection that in this case looks like just another wireless network.