0:02

Two and a half admins episode 200. I'm Joe. I'm

0:05

Jim. And I'm Alan. We did it

0:07

boys. We got to 200. And

0:09

to celebrate, we're going to do a free consulting

0:12

special. So it'll be all of your questions all

0:14

the time. A reminder that you

0:16

can send in your questions for future episodes

0:18

to show at 2.5admins.com. And also a thank

0:20

you to everyone who supports us with PayPal

0:22

and Patreon. We really do appreciate that. You

0:24

can learn more at 2.5admins.com slash

0:27

support, as well as getting

0:29

advert free RSS feeds and some

0:32

episodes early. You also get to

0:34

skip the queue for free consulting, which

0:36

is what a bunch of people did this time along

0:38

with a bunch of people who aren't patrons. But let's

0:40

start with all the Patreon questions. So

0:43

Scott writes, I'm curious if Jim and

0:45

Alan have noticed that hard drive models seem

0:47

to be rotated out of production much more

0:49

quickly as of late. It

0:51

feels like every time I need to buy a new hard

0:53

drive, I never get the capacity that I'm looking for. Even

0:56

if I'm not in need of an upgrade. For

0:58

example, several months ago, I bought a couple

1:00

of refurbished 12 terabyte Iron Wolves

1:03

for my home backup server. Just

1:05

this morning, one of them faulted. So I went

1:07

online to see about getting a replacement. I

1:09

looked on all my usual websites and

1:11

couldn't find any 12 terabyte models for

1:13

sale, refurbished or otherwise, except for a

1:15

few third party sellers on Amazon at

1:17

a ridiculous markup. I wound up

1:20

just picking up an 18 terabyte disc to fill

1:22

the gap for now, since I don't want

1:24

to wait for the warranty replacement to show up. But

1:26

I feel like this wasn't an issue a few years ago.

1:29

Is this because technologies like Hammer are becoming

1:31

more mature, and we're seeing the

1:33

density shoot up like crazy? I guess

1:35

it makes sense that they wouldn't want to keep an

1:37

excessive number of product lines going. Nope, that's not the

1:39

reason. Actually, hard drive models, as far

1:42

as I can tell, aren't rotating through any

1:44

more frequently than they ever have. The

1:46

big difference is normal people

1:48

are starting to not care about increased

1:50

capacity per drive on rust discs because

1:52

they've gotten so huge. Ten

1:55

years ago, when you had a transition from

1:57

4 terabytes to 8 terabytes, almost anybody who

1:59

saw a terabyte drives for almost the

2:01

same price as four terabyte drives were immediately

2:03

going to go for the eight terabyte because

2:06

they were probably getting crowded. But

2:08

we finally got to the point now, there

2:10

are lots and lots of people who don't

2:12

actually need more than about 12 terabytes of

2:14

storage. And even amongst folks who

2:16

are building RAID arrays, you know, the folks

2:18

who built arrays out of, you know,

2:21

say eight to 10 12 terabyte drives,

2:23

very frequently don't actually need more storage than

2:25

that. So I don't think it's so much

2:27

that the models are updating more quickly is

2:30

that you care a lot less than you

2:32

used to. His complaint mostly is

2:34

that he can't find a 12 terabyte drive for sale

2:36

anymore. Only the bigger sizes. And

2:38

I think part of that is that yes,

2:41

there's some rotation happening faster. Although part of that

2:43

is also just the vendors like the stores don't

2:45

want to be caught with a whole bunch of

2:47

hard drives that nobody wants or that they're going

2:50

to have to sell for less than they paid

2:52

for them because, you know, the price

2:54

per terabyte is coming down. So there's a chunk

2:56

of that. And some degree

2:58

it does feel to me like I've tried to

3:00

quickly find a graph of hard drive size over

3:02

time, but most of them are either over such

3:04

a long time span, you can't really tell. But

3:07

I do feel like we settled in this area

3:09

where like the three and four terabyte drives were

3:11

pretty popular for a number of years and I

3:13

bought a whole bunch of them and then suddenly

3:16

couldn't anymore. But at the

3:18

same time, I also realized that I have

3:20

a bunch of 12 terabyte drives that are

3:22

failing now. And I looked at it

3:24

and they're more than five years old. So that

3:26

a warranty. A 12 terabyte drive is not as

3:29

new of a thing as it is in my

3:31

head. And so it makes

3:33

sense that hard drive manufacturers aren't still

3:36

producing 12 terabyte models because

3:38

that was more than five years ago.

3:40

And if every bit of manufacturing capacity

3:42

they have is making 18, 20 and 24 terabyte drives

3:44

now, not the 12 terabyte drives. Seven

3:49

years. Seagate introduced 12 terabyte drives to

3:51

consumers in the mass market seven years

3:53

ago in 2017. Yeah. So

3:56

it is not that odd for those

3:58

models to stop being available now. now,

4:00

seven years later. You saw

4:02

similar transition times between four terabyte and

4:04

eight terabyte, two terabyte and four terabyte.

4:07

It's just about how it goes. Yeah. I think

4:09

part of that is my perception was once we

4:11

got to three terabyte, that was big enough that

4:14

I bought all of them when

4:16

they first came out, but I just

4:18

kept using them until they weren't available

4:20

anymore basically. Because to Jim's point, once

4:22

they got much bigger than that, like

4:24

a decent sized array, you didn't generally

4:26

need more than that. I had an anecdote of

4:28

this literally come up today where a friend asked

4:30

me, I want to build a NAS, I need

4:34

a single digit number of terabytes. I'm

4:36

like, you can't buy a

4:38

hard drive in a single digit number of terabytes

4:40

anymore. I guess you're getting a

4:42

mirror of the smallest hard drives you can buy. Or

4:45

go solid state. Yeah. If you only need a

4:47

small number, yeah, we could look at probably for

4:49

the same budget, you would get a lot less

4:52

space. But if it's a couple

4:54

of terabytes of NVMe versus tens of

4:56

terabytes of hard drive, if you only

4:58

need a couple of terabytes, then your

5:01

money's better spent on the higher performance

5:03

drives. But yeah, I've been in

5:05

the same position as Scott. And yeah, I

5:07

replaced a bunch of six,

5:09

eight and 12 terabyte drives with 16

5:11

and 18 terabyte drives that

5:13

I got from server part deals. And

5:16

when it's time to replace drives, I go

5:18

there and find the lowest cost per terabyte

5:20

that's the right SAS versus SATA, depending what

5:22

I'm replacing, and just get a

5:24

couple of those. Yeah, that's the other thing that's

5:26

probably worth addressing here is if you've got a

5:28

rate array and a disk fails and you need

5:31

to buy a new one and replace it, or

5:33

you're looking to expand it, whatever. Generally

5:36

speaking, you're not actually looking specifically for

5:38

the same capacity as all the other

5:40

drives in the array, you're looking for

5:42

that capacity or larger. And as Alan

5:45

said, you're looking for a cost per

5:47

terabyte. Because ideally, if you're

5:49

keeping this array alive for multiple generations

5:51

of drives, you want to be able

5:54

to auto expand it, you know, once

5:56

the smallest drive remaining in the

5:58

array gets replaced with a larger size, then

6:01

you can increase the capacity. But

6:03

until then, yeah, you don't specifically

6:05

want to match an 8

6:07

terabyte drive to an array built

6:09

out of 8 terabyte drives, not

6:12

when, you know, 12 terabyte drives

6:14

and 14 and 18 are literally

6:16

the same cost and newer and

6:18

faster. You know, that's what you

6:20

do. Harold, who's a

6:22

patron, writes, I know there's a

6:24

lot of fanfare about USB-C, but I've had a

6:26

lot of trouble with it, which

6:29

I never had with previous ports or connectors.

6:31

The essential phone was the first device I

6:33

owned with USB-C. I had no problems with

6:35

it. Since then, I've

6:37

had two phones. First was a Moto G

6:40

power. Two years later, it won't stay connected

6:42

to its USB-C cable to charge. Then I

6:44

got a Pixel 5, which is a flagship

6:46

phone and it is in the same state

6:48

as the Moto G, but at least it

6:50

has wireless charging and KD Connect, otherwise it

6:52

would be garbage. Obviously

6:55

it is a cheap plug, but why is it

6:57

so cheaply made? Is it more

6:59

prone to wear and tear than other ports or

7:01

is manufacturing going downhill? My ThinkPad,

7:03

which I've had for many more years, is

7:06

fine, but then again, I'm not unplugging it

7:08

nearly as often. I

7:10

can't replicate this person's results,

7:13

unfortunately, so I don't know how

7:15

to answer that. In my family,

7:18

we have had markedly fewer issues

7:20

with failing ports since the transition

7:22

to USB-C. Basically, the

7:24

only one in my extended family

7:26

who has managed to damage USB-C

7:29

ports is my

7:31

wife's little brother who has

7:33

some mental and physical issues

7:35

and he's extremely rough on

7:37

hardware. He destroys everything, which

7:40

includes USB-C. My own kids

7:42

routinely destroyed USB-A ports and

7:44

they haven't yet broken anything

7:47

USB-C. Yeah, micro USB was prime

7:49

for it because people would jam it in the

7:51

wrong way. Yeah, and USB-C being universal. It

7:53

was the one thing I would give the

7:55

Lightning Connector over USB-C is they made the

7:58

part that would break off beyond the case.

8:00

not the device end and

8:02

USBC maybe should have inverted

8:04

that as well, but I've not managed to break any

8:06

of my devices, but my use case is a bit

8:10

different and I do worry about like my

8:12

Lenovo X270 that I bought had USBC charging,

8:15

but also still had

8:17

the rectangular Lenovo charging port, but

8:19

my new T14 that came yesterday

8:21

has USBC only, which is mostly a pain because

8:23

I don't have that many USBC chargers and I

8:25

need to get some more. But

8:28

if it were to break that port, that

8:30

would be an issue for me,

8:32

but I've not had that problem with any of

8:34

my devices. Well, the T14 that I got for

8:37

my wife's niece recently, I think it was a

8:39

Gen 3, that has got at least two USBC

8:41

ports that are capable of charging it. The one

8:43

that says it's for charging, obviously

8:45

will charge it, but the other ones will as well. So

8:47

don't worry too much. I'm actually at

8:50

the point now where I'm a little annoyed

8:52

that everybody is still doing the full on

8:54

wired USBC rather than doing

8:56

MagSafe style charging. I know in an

8:58

earlier episode, Alan and I both came

9:01

across as very skeptical of the inexpensive

9:03

plug-in USBC devices that allow you

9:05

to have a magnetically coupled connection.

9:08

But since several of our listeners said, no,

9:10

those things are great. You guys are idiots.

9:13

I bought some to test and yeah, I can confirm those

9:15

things are freaking great. I use them all over the place.

9:17

And as a matter of fact, that's

9:19

what's currently on my little

9:21

brother-in-law's laptop, you know, the one who keeps

9:24

destroying everything, he destroyed the charging port and

9:26

half of the other hardware on his latest

9:28

laptop a couple of months ago. And I

9:31

made certain that the next laptop that I

9:33

got for him had USBC power delivery. And

9:36

I bought, you know, the little right

9:38

angle adapters to plug in. So everything

9:40

is just magnetic connected. And

9:43

my little brother kind of hates

9:45

it because, you know, he unplugs it

9:47

all the time. But like, that's a good

9:49

thing. He's actually unplugging it as opposed to

9:52

destroying his freaking laptop when he bangs

9:54

that stuff around. So it's great. I

9:57

should mention also when I say that

9:59

we're talking about magnetic coupled and USB

10:02

power delivery, by his

10:04

laptop, it draws a lot

10:06

of current across that magnetic coupling

10:08

and it works fine.

10:10

Like there's no issue even with, you

10:12

know, high voltage, high current USB power

10:14

delivery over these magnetic coupled connections. So

10:16

I'm to the point now of thinking

10:18

like those should actually be standard. And

10:21

if you want something to be more resistant

10:23

to the cable, you know, coming unplugged, well,

10:25

then maybe you should have like a retainer

10:28

for that magnetically coupled connection for

10:30

that device, rather than just

10:33

relying on, you know, the mechanical crankiness

10:35

of pins to keep it in. Yeah.

10:39

To Harold's point, I wonder if it's

10:41

maybe he has bad USB-C cables rather

10:43

than the device, that's the problem, I

10:45

don't know. That is entirely possible. Okay,

10:48

this episode is sponsored by

10:50

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10:57

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11:45

Toby, who's a patron, writes, I'm

11:47

now running ZFS on my VPS. It

11:49

works a treat and I enabled compression

11:51

and encryption. However, one thing

11:53

that took me by surprise is how slow

11:55

and CPU intensive it is to do a

11:58

DU-HSC. on

12:00

a folder with many subfolders and files. As

12:03

a comparison, I tested this by downloading

12:05

an xCloud release zip and then

12:07

unzipped it and then ran

12:10

timedu-hsc on various partitions, on

12:12

the same machine using the

12:14

same drive, with the following

12:16

results. LVM and XFS 21 seconds.

12:20

ZFS no compression no encryption 2

12:22

minutes 3 seconds. ZFS with

12:25

compression and encryption 7 minutes

12:27

7 seconds. As you

12:29

can see, even without encryption and compression,

12:31

ZFS is way slower. So how does

12:33

one get directory usage on ZFS in

12:35

a reasonable time? Okay,

12:37

so the first thing here is you

12:39

said nextcloud and since you said nextcloud,

12:42

that means you're using ACLs. You

12:45

didn't specify an operating system directly,

12:47

but you said LVM, so that

12:49

means Linux. That leaves

12:51

us with something that you almost certainly didn't

12:53

do, which is ZFS set xattr

12:56

equals sa on

12:58

the the directory containing your nextcloud

13:00

files before you unzip the files

13:02

into it. If you

13:05

don't set xattr equals sa, then ZFS

13:07

has to store the metadata for each

13:09

file in a completely separate block. Whereas

13:12

if you set xattr equals sa, the

13:15

metadata actually gets stored in the

13:17

leading block on smaller files with

13:19

a tremendous increase in performance when

13:22

you're just static every file out of

13:24

a huge list, which is exactly what

13:26

you're doing here. So the first

13:28

thing is going to be make sure you set xattr

13:31

equals sa on anywhere that you're doing your

13:33

nextcloud stuff. Do that before you

13:35

actually set nextcloud up in that data

13:37

set and then try your tests again.

13:39

I would also say

13:41

I would expect your results with

13:43

encryption to remain considerably slower for

13:45

this workload. Compression however, on its

13:48

own, should not affect it. Also,

13:50

the results seem oddly slow for even

13:52

LVM there. The number of

13:55

files in the nextcloud source is

13:57

probably not tens of thousands

13:59

or anything. And especially if

14:01

you just unzipped it, in ZFS those

14:03

files should be in the cache, at

14:05

least the metadata for them anyway, mostly.

14:07

So I would expect the results to

14:09

run DU to take two minutes to

14:12

be kind of a little out

14:14

there. Although I guess the VPS probably has

14:16

very little amount of RAM. There we go.

14:18

Yeah, you said this is on a VPS,

14:20

not on a host in a data center

14:22

that Toby is setting VMs up on. Sure,

14:24

but like if it has a gig of

14:26

RAM, it should have some cache for the

14:28

size of this tarball or zip file. Even

14:30

if it has two gigs of RAM, you're

14:32

not going to be left with a whole

14:34

lot of workable cache. Have you

14:36

ever tried to set ZFS up on Linode

14:39

or DigitalOcean? It's painful. Yeah, I have it

14:41

on all my DigitalOcean boxes and they only

14:43

have a gig of RAM and they use

14:45

at least like half of it for cache.

14:47

All I can say is I can absolutely

14:50

confirm the result that he's seeing with like

14:52

there is a definite performance penalty going

14:54

from, you know, EXT4 or

14:57

XFS to especially an untuned

14:59

ZFS on something as itty

15:01

bitty as the typical VPS. Yeah, in general, ZFS

15:04

is always going to be slower because it's doing

15:06

a lot more work. XFS isn't

15:08

generating a checksum to see if the data

15:10

is corrupt or not before returning it to

15:12

you, even when you're just looking at the

15:14

metadata to run DU. And

15:16

it's obviously not doing compression and encryption and so

15:18

on. But as Jim said, especially with

15:20

the X adders thing, that's causing it to take

15:22

twice as many IOPS and on a slow VPS,

15:25

that's a lot of extra work. To

15:27

your other question about getting the directory size in a

15:29

reasonable amount of time, DU is not

15:31

bad. If it's a separate

15:34

data set, then ZFS list will just

15:36

know these numbers ahead of time and

15:38

you're fine. There's also another mechanism in

15:40

ZFS where for

15:42

each data set, you can tell how

15:44

much space was used by each username.

15:46

So the ZFS user space command on

15:48

a data set can instantly tell you

15:51

the gym user is using eight gigabytes and

15:53

the Allen user is using four gigabytes in

15:55

this data set because it tracks

15:57

it as you write the data and

15:59

keeps that information. up to date so

16:01

that you don't have to go and

16:03

calculate it at runtime with something like

16:05

DU. Today I learned, what was the

16:07

command again Alan? Setfs, space,

16:10

user space, all one word, space, the

16:12

dataset. And it will say the

16:15

POSIX user Alan is using 1.5 terabytes and

16:17

the POSIX user Jim is using 350

16:20

megabytes. And it can also tell you how

16:22

many files that is. Just randomly

16:24

looking at my podcast directory, I have 5.5

16:26

thousand files and

16:29

another user has 22 files and the third

16:31

user has 57 files. And that

16:33

gives you that data instantly on any dataset.

16:35

Well we've got a huge list of questions

16:37

so we better move on. But if you

16:39

want to learn more about ZFS stuff then

16:41

I recommend joining Jim's Practical ZFS Discourse Forum

16:44

where you can ask questions and discuss it

16:46

to your heart's content. Brian

16:48

who's a patron writes, I have

16:50

a small amount of data to back up by today's

16:52

standards, one and a half terabytes, and

16:55

I currently do a full backup of all

16:57

my data to a series of external USB

16:59

hard drives that I rotate on a schedule

17:01

basis. Some of these backup

17:03

drives are stored off-site. Jim

17:05

and Alan have mentioned several times not

17:08

to use external USB drives since the

17:10

drives are not high quality. What

17:12

would you recommend that I use instead for cold

17:14

storage backups? Purchase a 2.5 inch

17:17

server hard drive and put it in USB Caddy?

17:19

Ideally, yes, but I do not think

17:21

that you should just rush

17:24

out and throw away everything you have to replace it

17:26

with that. Will you get better

17:28

results on average with NAS

17:31

or server grade drives in a

17:33

Caddy than with the USB portable

17:35

hard drives at the manufacturer's cell?

17:37

Yes, but you've already said that you have

17:40

a whole series of them and you're rotating

17:42

them regularly. If you're accurately describing your backup

17:44

routine and you actually have the discipline to

17:46

keep it up, you're basically

17:48

good to go even with garbage

17:50

drives. Feel good about what

17:53

you have and what you're doing. As you

17:55

replace them, I would advise Exos or Ironwool's

17:57

drives in generic Caddy. Yeah, although you mentioned

17:59

two and a half inch, probably because you're

18:01

wanting to not need the separate power that

18:03

three and a half inch drives normally do.

18:06

In which case, I'd suggest a

18:08

two terabyte SATA SSD will give

18:10

you what you're looking for and

18:12

not be overly expensive. That's probably

18:14

only $100 or so for

18:16

the SSD and that still gives you the

18:19

capacity you need. But yeah, like Jim said,

18:21

as long as you're using multiple of them,

18:23

external USB drive isn't bad. We were most

18:25

talking about people trying to build the main

18:27

array out of USB drives and just don't

18:29

do that. And also don't

18:31

depend on one external USB drive as your

18:33

backup because yes, there's a good chance that

18:35

it'll go bad. But if you have multiple, all

18:37

of them going bad at once seems less likely.

18:40

And finally, don't depend on even one USB external

18:42

drive hooked up 24, 7, 365. That is not

18:44

what that connection

18:46

type is for. You will have bad

18:49

results. Yeah. What I've learned from 200

18:51

episodes of this show is that you

18:53

should treat every single hard drive as

18:55

if it is about to die. If

18:58

you do that, then you'll be fine because

19:00

you'll have enough copies of your data in enough different

19:02

places that when they do

19:04

die, you'll be fine. That is correct.

19:06

Yeah. It's like the opening line of

19:08

the ZFS book I wrote was literally

19:10

like, your hard drives are lying to

19:13

you. They're just going to die. ZFS

19:15

at least warns you and helps you stop them.

19:17

Well, all we are is dust in the wind,

19:19

dude, and hard drives are no different. Yeah. When

19:22

you think about how a hard drive works where

19:24

there's this head floating less than

19:26

the width of a hair over

19:28

a platter spinning at 7,200 RPM,

19:30

there's a good chance something's going

19:33

to go wrong. You did mention

19:35

USB SSDs. It's worth mentioning,

19:37

don't get those little Samsung ones that

19:40

are an NVMe drive in

19:42

an enclosure that you can't open

19:44

easily because they are garbage.

19:46

Get yourself a SATA one and an enclosure

19:48

for it, a caddy for it. Mostly just

19:51

because the SATA ones don't get as hot

19:53

and don't need separate cooling and external

19:56

enclosures never had good cooling. Yeah,

19:58

I would agree. form factor is

20:01

far safer for this than NVMe. NVMe

20:03

drives tend to eat themselves a lot,

20:05

kind of no matter what. I mean,

20:07

even inside a chassis, an

20:10

NVMe drive is more likely

20:12

to have overheating type issues than a SATA

20:14

drive. But when you're talking about

20:16

putting it in a cheap enclosure, yeah,

20:18

you definitely don't want NVMe. We should

20:20

be more specific that when Jim says

20:22

NVMe there, he's talking about M.2. There

20:25

are NVMe drives that look like a two

20:27

and a half inch SATA drive, that's the

20:29

U2 and U3 format, and they have

20:32

lots of metal and they're not the thing that looks like a

20:34

stick of gum that gets really hot. Okay,

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21:46

Tony, who's a patron, writes, how did you

21:49

get to your level of knowledge? Is

21:51

it only experience or are there learning paths

21:53

that you would recommend? How

21:55

would you recommend someone like me getting to

21:58

your knowledge level? Well... First

22:00

you find something that you want to do and then

22:02

you do it. You know, it's how I learned. I'm

22:04

pretty sure that's the majority of how Alan learned. And

22:07

for that matter, although it's a different skill set,

22:09

I'm pretty sure that's how Joe learned too. Ultimately,

22:12

you know, you just reach for something that's a little

22:14

bit out of your grasp. You say, Hey, I know

22:16

what this thing is. I don't know how to do

22:18

this thing yet, but I have a

22:20

general big picture idea of what it does and

22:23

how it would probably have to work for the

22:25

most part. And then you just

22:27

buckle down implementing it. And you know, you figured

22:29

out as you go along, but the

22:31

thing that really keeps you invested in keeps

22:33

you learning and keeps you retaining that knowledge

22:36

is doing things that you wanted to

22:38

do in the first place. If

22:41

you can't find a goal that you want to

22:43

hit, then you may have trouble acquiring the knowledge.

22:45

Yeah, that was definitely it for me. I got

22:48

into Unix because I had

22:50

been into IRC for a little while and I run driven

22:52

my own IRC server and I

22:54

eventually learned that, you know, I wanted a Unix

22:56

machine to run it on. And

22:58

so I then I had to learn that and

23:01

how to download a tarball and extract it and

23:03

compile software and run it and edit the config

23:05

files and all that from there,

23:07

and then I decided I don't like

23:09

all these hosting providers. They're too janky. I'm going to

23:11

be my own hosting provider. And I learned how to

23:14

do all that. And then when you're renting out access

23:16

to your machine and people are trying to

23:18

break it, you learn how to fix it and be smarter than them.

23:21

Another big thing is take

23:23

copious notes, document what you're

23:25

doing. Not just half ass,

23:27

like take it seriously. My

23:29

favorite process when I'm learning something new is

23:31

I will first figure out how to do

23:33

it and I will try to take

23:36

notes as I go along. And then as soon as I've got

23:38

it working, I throw the whole damn thing away. And I try

23:40

to do it again, following my notes. I

23:42

will invariably find something that I didn't document

23:44

well enough in my notes. And if

23:47

I did a really good job the first time

23:49

around, I may know what it is that I

23:51

didn't write immediately and be able to just fix

23:53

it that way, or I may

23:55

have to actually figure out the things that

23:57

I failed to document properly, but either way.

24:00

if I had to think at any point during

24:02

this process when I'm trying to follow my own

24:04

notes that I've already written, well, once

24:07

I get done and get it working, I throw

24:09

it away again and start over. Until I can

24:11

get to the point where I can literally just

24:13

follow my own notes blindly without really having to

24:16

think about it and everything works at the end,

24:18

I'm not done yet. And what

24:20

that does for you is, in addition to giving

24:22

you awesome documentation to follow later on when you've

24:24

forgotten how to do this thing because it's been

24:26

two or three years, but now you need to

24:28

do it again and you'd really rather not have

24:30

to spend another 20 hours figuring it out. In

24:33

addition to that, you'll learn so much

24:35

more about it because in that process of

24:37

throwing it away and having to do it

24:40

again until you can literally just follow your

24:42

notes, you're not only producing

24:44

that structure on the page, you're

24:46

also creating that structure in your

24:48

head. You understand what it is

24:51

that you did so much better

24:53

once you've actually gotten through the

24:55

full process top to bottom in

24:58

a coherent, logical, easy to follow

25:00

format. Steven, who's a

25:02

patron, writes, I have several

25:04

sabrant external hard drive enclosures, but I

25:06

cannot always swap drives between them. I

25:09

have narrowed it down to two types

25:11

where all drives formatted with one enclosure

25:13

works in this set of enclosures, and

25:16

all the ones formatted with the second work with

25:18

the second. I also remember a

25:20

previous episode where Jim gave a reason for this,

25:22

but I cannot remember what or why this can

25:24

occur. Do you guys know why

25:27

this may be the case? Is there

25:29

a way to detect or correct for using

25:31

drives formatted with the other type of enclosure?

25:33

I think I know the answer to this. It's

25:36

something to do with certain enclosures reserving a

25:38

few blocks at the beginning or something. Usually the end,

25:40

I think, but yes, it can be that and

25:43

just what sector size they use, but

25:45

a lot of times it is that

25:47

little bit of reserve space for their

25:49

own metadata, and then if that

25:51

aligns with the GPT table or not. Although usually

25:53

it really depends on what you mean by formatted

25:55

here, and oftentimes I would expect you

25:57

to be able to make it work. If

26:00

you don't care about the data that's on the drive when you're swapping enclosures,

26:02

you can just put down a new partition table and it'll

26:04

be fine. In most of the

26:07

other cases, operating systems have different ways

26:09

of dealing with a drive that says

26:11

it's this big, but actually the hardware

26:13

reports not being that big. Some

26:15

of them just won't show you the partitions. Some of them will

26:17

tell you there's an error and sometimes it's

26:19

easy to fix and sometimes it's not. The

26:22

Caddies that I use are typically, they're

26:24

not trying to be that clever. The Caddy is

26:26

not inserting any metadata of its own. It's literally

26:28

just a USB to set a bridge. How

26:31

you make certain that the Caddy that you're buying

26:33

is a simple USB to set a bridge and

26:35

is not doing something more

26:37

advanced and or foolhardy on its own, I

26:40

don't know the answer to that one, unfortunately. I wish I did. Some

26:43

of it can also just be like the sector

26:45

size. If it always tries to

26:48

show 4K sectors and the drive has an odd

26:50

number of 512E sectors or something, it

26:52

can get weird. Other than

26:55

checking that it's not something with the GPT partition

26:57

table, I don't know what else

26:59

to say. Yeah, I kind of wonder if

27:01

this isn't an issue with some of the

27:03

drives being a different capacity than the others

27:05

or some being 512 versus 4K and

27:08

one of the Caddy models being older and

27:10

not understanding either too large a capacity that

27:12

didn't exist when that Caddy was made or

27:15

possibly not understanding a separate sector

27:17

size. Because again, ultimately, you're really

27:19

not expecting these things to be

27:21

doing much with the

27:24

drive. We're not talking about a

27:26

RAID enclosure. Now, when you're talking about something

27:28

that sets up a RAID array, well, then

27:30

yeah, you've necessarily got some pretty proprietary metadata

27:32

that's going. You don't

27:34

know where on those drives actually can be the

27:36

beginning, can be the end, can be both, and

27:38

you can have some serious issues with that. But

27:40

a single USB enclosure sold

27:42

without drive really shouldn't be doing anything but

27:45

bridging USB to Caddy. Yeah, and I think

27:47

that's generally the biggest thing is if you

27:49

can buy it without a drive, that's more

27:51

likely to be universal than when it comes

27:53

with a drive. But yeah, the

27:55

other thing to remember is the point of these

27:58

USB things is actually to take the often SATA

28:00

drive and make it look like a SCSI drive,

28:02

which is not the same thing. But

28:04

it shouldn't really need metadata, but they do all

28:06

kinds of weird things. And depends

28:09

how well written the firmware is that is doing

28:11

the conversion from SATA to SCSI. I

28:14

think the big takeaway that I'm getting here is

28:16

maybe avoid Sabron enclosures. I recognize that brand. I've

28:18

used a couple of those in the past, but

28:20

that's always been kind of a, kind

28:23

of like a second choice for me. Like

28:25

it, it works, but I don't know, just

28:27

something doesn't really leave me with the best

28:30

taste in my mouth about that brand. I've

28:33

more commonly used them for like completely

28:35

dumb 2.5 to 3.5 adapters to

28:38

stick into cases. Kind of hard to mess that up.

28:41

Michael writes, is there a

28:43

program or setting that will send an

28:46

email or text notification when a windows

28:48

servers CPU temperature exceeds some threshold? I

28:51

know of programs that will display temperatures

28:53

on request, but nothing that supports

28:55

remote monitoring. When you occasionally log

28:58

onto the server administratively, does

29:00

it have to be done manually via a schedule

29:02

task? I no longer run windows.

29:04

So truly asking for a friend. Yeah. We

29:06

believe you, Michael. Yeah. The request

29:08

seems a little weird. Like normally what you

29:10

would do for this type of thing is

29:13

have monitoring that is going to go and

29:15

check on all the servers and do it.

29:17

And that mostly doesn't happen that

29:19

much on the server. Maybe there's an agent on the

29:21

server that provides the answers to what is your temperature,

29:23

but you want the stuff that's checking

29:25

it to be on a different machine because

29:28

if the CPU temperature is getting that high

29:30

on the machine, the machines having trouble and

29:32

you don't trust it to alert you anymore.

29:34

Also, I've tried to remember the last

29:37

time I had a server overheat, like outside

29:39

of a hardware failure, that's not

29:41

likely to be a thing. And I

29:43

also caution about deciding on a

29:46

threshold there because most modern CPUs

29:48

will keep underclocking themselves to stay

29:50

under the temperature at

29:52

which they have a problem. And so

29:54

the server might never get to an

29:56

extreme temperature. It'll just keep getting slower

29:58

until it's not overheated. Yeah, but maybe

30:01

you want to know why your server is so slow.

30:03

Maybe it would be nice to see at a glance,

30:06

oh, it's been running at 90 degrees

30:08

for three hours straight now, and it's slower

30:10

than it was three hours ago. How about

30:12

that? But yeah, to Alan's

30:14

point, I'm the same way. Generally, if I

30:16

want to monitor something like that on a

30:19

Windows box, I will just

30:21

use Nagios and I'll write custom plug-ins for

30:23

it, just like I would on a Linux

30:25

machine. Now, with that said, there's a

30:27

tool that we used extensively at Ars Technica when

30:29

we were doing hardware reviews

30:32

of new systems called HW info

30:34

that gives you extremely low level

30:36

information about everything from temperatures

30:38

to voltage levels to you name it, you

30:40

know, on all kinds of pieces of your

30:43

machine. And although we didn't use

30:45

it for what you're looking for, HW

30:47

info I just checked absolutely can

30:49

be set up to do email

30:51

notifications, actually several other types of

30:53

notifications. It's got plug-ins to connect

30:55

to various kinds of external monitoring

30:57

systems. So that's probably going to be

31:00

the answer that you're looking for is look

31:02

for HW info, install it and find out what

31:04

it can do for you. Yeah, but I guess

31:06

my earlier point was more if you

31:08

set the threshold to 95, it might never get there

31:10

because it'll stop at 90. But yes,

31:12

having monitoring and history can be

31:15

really helpful. On our servers,

31:17

we log the temperature of every core constantly and

31:19

make a graph out of it, and

31:21

it can be really interesting to see when the

31:23

server wasn't any busier, but suddenly got a lot

31:25

hotter. Oh, maybe the air conditioning at the data

31:27

center had a problem, or even

31:30

just my house is hotter today than

31:32

it normally is because we're under a

31:34

heat dome here in Canada today, and

31:37

how that affects everything else that's going on.

31:39

But yeah, if you're going to monitor CPU

31:41

temperature, you might as well be monitoring everything.

31:43

And so yeah, a remote monitoring system may

31:45

be fed with HW info, sounds like the

31:47

right solution. Right, well, we

31:49

better get out of here then. Thank you, everyone

31:52

who sent in your questions. Clearly, we did not

31:54

get to anywhere near all of them. We

31:56

will try and answer them as soon as we

31:58

possibly can. So stay tuned for

32:01

that. But in the meantime, if

32:03

you want to send in any more questions, you

32:05

can do so show at 2.5admins.com. In

32:08

particular, any of you folks out there who, you

32:10

know, live day in, day out in the Windows

32:12

world, Al and I do work with Windows every

32:14

single day, but it's not

32:16

our favorite platform. And some of y'all may know

32:18

some tools that we're not familiar with. But

32:21

for now, you can find me at

32:23

joerest.com/mastodon. You can find me at mercenarycysadmin.com.

32:26

And I'm at Alan Jude. We'll see

32:28

you next week. Microsoft

32:30

Mechanics www.microsoft.com.com