The young artist in the house, who will soon have an upgraded
PC for the new year, will be then running
Ubuntu Studio22.04,
made for creative people.
The current system is running Ubuntu Studio 20.04 on a very
old system, based on an AMD Phenom II X4 and an Asus M4A89GTD
Pro/USB3 from 2010. In preparation for the upcoming upgrade,
the process starts by installing Ubuntu Studio 22.04 on a old
SSD on my own PC (Rapture), which can later be
transplanted to the new PC.
This is the kind of thing that makes you think,
this really only happens to me.
Back in June, when the availability and price of graphics card
finally approached relatively normal values, I got myself an new
ASUS GeForce TUF Gaming RTX 3070 Ti OC Edition
(to replace the old
ASUS GeForce GTX 1070 STRIX
from 2017). It still was still nearly $800 but it was clearly never
going to come down to $570 the old one costed back in August 2017.
Then, in September, the new card died. Somewhat surreptitiously...
At some point all browsers in my PC started to refuse showing
accented characters (e.g. è) when the correct keys are pressed
(first ` then e). This started happening before reinstalling the OS (Ubuntu Studio 22.04).
Reinstalling the system, which came about for other reasons,
did not help.
My only NAS is my PC. At least, what people would usually do with,
or build a NAS for, I just do it with my PC.
Most of my disk storage space is a
BTRFS RAID 1
using two
6TB WD BLACK 3.5″ HDD.
This setup offers
block-level redundancy which is better
than the classic device-level redundancy offered by
Linux Software RAID
or hardware RAID.
To keep BTRFS file systems healthy, it is strongly recommended to
run a weekly scrub
to check everything for consistency. For this, I run the script from
crontab every Saturday night (it usually ends around noon the next day).
One Sunday morning, after many successful scrubs, I woke up to both
disks failing, each in a different way. But this was not the end of
it. And the end of this adventure, disks emerged victorious.
Keeping reading to find out how the disks came back from the dead.
But only a little bit, maybe just enough to run a Minecraft
server, which refuses to start on my Raspberry Pi 4
because it has only a meagre 2 GB of RAM.
I had known about Intel NUC tiny PCs for a while, and
how handy they can be to have a dedicated physical PC for
experimentation. There was a very real possibility
that I would have to set one up as a light gaming PC in the
near future, so I thought cutting my teeth on a simpler
server setup would be a good way to get acquainted with this
hardware platform and its Linux support.
In fact, when I started building detailed process monitoring
I knew nothing about
telegraf,
influxdb,
grafana
or even Raspberry Pi computers.
It was back in 2017, when pondering whether to build my next
PC around an
Intel Core i7-6950X
or an
AMD Ryzen 5 1600X, that I started looking into measuring
CPU usage of a specific process. I wanted to better see and
understand whether more (but slower) CPU cores would be a
better investment than faster (but fewer) CPU cores.
At the time my PC had a
AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE C3
with 4 cores at 3.4GHz, and I had no idea how often those CPU
cores were all used to their full extent. To learn more about
the possibilities (and limitations) of fully
multi-threading CPU-bound applications, I started running
top commands in a loop and dumping lines in .csv files to
then plot charts in Google Sheets. This was very crude, but
it did show the difference between rendering a video in
Blender (not multi-threaded) compared to using the
pulverize tool to
fully multi-thread the same task:
This early ad-hoc effort resulted in a few scripts to
measure per-proccess CPU usage, overall CPU with thermals,
and even GPU usage.
Audible is great, and the app is not bad, but I find Plex and
other apps more attractive to use for audiobooks. Now, if
only I could take my books home...
