This is a short rewrite of a post I wrote elsewhere, but which is no longer easily searchable or accessible.
If you’ve got a DIMM that’s going bad and your system supports Machine Check Architecture (MCA) / Machine Check Exceptions (MCEs), you might see alerts about memory errors popping up in your logs or console output. They typically look something like this:
MCA: Bank 9, Status 0x8c000047000800c0
MCA: Global Cap 0x0000000007000c16, Status 0x0000000000000000
MCA: Vendor "GenuineIntel", ID...
Intel has a technology called Virtual RAID on CPU (VROC) that lets you set up RAID arrays of NVMe SSDs, with the RAID calculations being offloaded to specialised hardware on the CPU instead of being done in software. When I built my workstation back in 2019, I installed an Asus HYPER M.2 card, which is a PCIe 3.0 x16 carrier card that breaks out into four M.2 slots. The M.2 slots are separated using 4-way bifurcation, which allows one 16-lane slot to be split into four 4-lane slots. With four Corsair MP510...
FreeNAS 11.x is no longer receiving package updates due to the major version update to TrueNAS 12.x. A side effect is that the CA certificates database from systems on 11.x is now outdated and contains expired CA certificates. This causes errors such as the following when attempting to create jails or update the OS:
Update server could not be reached
HTTPSConnectionPool(host='update-master.ixsystems.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /FreeNAS/trains.txt (Caused by...
Memory DIMMs have a small flash memory chip (EEPROM) on them, containing an important descriptor table called the Serial Presence Detect (SPD). This data tells the system the size, speed, timings, operating voltage, manufacturer, part number, overclocking profiles, and all sorts of other information about each DIMM. The SPD chip is accessed using the SMBus protocol, which is based on I2C.
Tools such as CPU-Z, RAMMon, and RW Everything can be used to read the SPD data by talking to the flash chip over a...
SwiftOnSecurity asked “What would you change in Windows?”. There are a lot of replies to the thread, and I read them all. I have some of my own thoughts, too, but it was too much for a bunch of Twitter replies, and I think it’s probably useful to collate everything I saw in the thread (or at least the ones that I agree with - some of them are a bit wild) into one place. So without further ado, here’s what I would change in Windows:
Finish the new settings UI
The new settings system was a recurring theme...
At the worst possible moment, my C920 developed a horizontal line of dead pixels. I’m due to run an online event this weekend and I can’t do that without a half-decent webcam. But, with the lockdown in full effect, it seems that everyone has scrambled to buy them, and they’re out of stock everywhere - including Logitech’s own store. The RMA process is likely to take weeks, and I don’t have the luxury of waiting that long. I managed to find a BRIO 4K Stream Edition in stock at a rather inflated price, but...
Windows Server supports NIC Teaming, also known as Load Balancing/Failover (LBFO), which allows you to bond multiple network interfaces together, for example using 802.3ad (LACP). It used to be possible to use Powershell on Windows 10 to use teaming, even though it wasn’t intended, but in 2016 Microsoft said that the feature was never intended to be available on desktop SKUs, and removed it.
But, if it can be removed, it can be put back in!
By copying a few files and registry keys from a Windows...
I ran into an issue where trying to view a wiki page in Gitea threw an error:
template: repo/wiki/view:48:14: executing "repo/wiki/view" at <(not $.DisableHTTP) (and (not $.DisableSSH) (or $.IsSigned $.ExposeAnonSSH))>: can't give argument to non-function not $.DisableHTTP
This issue was fixed in Gitea 1.11.4, so you’re probably running 1.11.3 or before. The latest version of the Gitea plugin in FreeNAS, at time of writing, contains version 1.11.5, which fixes the issue. You can...
SMB Multi-Channel is a useful performance feature that distributes SMB traffic over multiple network connections, allowing it to scale across multiple network adapters, as well as multiple CPU cores through the use of receive-side scaling (RSS). It is supported and enabled in Windows 10 by default, and Samba has support for it as of version 4.4. At the time of writing, FreeNAS 11 is running smbd version 4.10.2, which of course means it supports multi-channel.
Multi-channel works by making multiple TCP...
I’m transitioning all of my local network services toward using an internal CA, but AdvancedTomato is a little trickier in that regard because it doesn’t have support for loading a custom cert or key in the web UI.
Instead, you must connect over SSH and modify the certificate files manually, then write them to nvram. Simply upload cert.pem and key.pem to the root home directory, then save this shell script:
cp ./cert.pem /etc/cert.pem
cp ./key.pem /etc/key.pem
sed -i "/END CERTIFICATE/q"...
TL;DR - OBS can do this using a display capture source and multiple output projectors. I’m using Streamlabs OBS on Windows, but you can probably make it work on regular OBS on any supported OS.
On my home workstation I’ve got three side-by-side monitors. Normally I roughly dedicate them to separate tasks - left usually has social/chat apps, music, etc., middle is whatever I’m working on, and right is usually either reserved for reference (e.g. documentation, diagrams, etc.) or as a sort of holding...
A lot of folks on the net seem to be interested in moving games from the Epic Games store from one drive to another, usually because they’re running out of space on their disk or they want to move the game to faster storage. I installed a bunch of games when I first built my new workstation, before I built a VROC RAID0 of M.2 NVMe SSDs, and wanted to move all of the games to the new large and fast storage array. Unfortunately, all of the advice I’ve found so far is basically to move the game files...
I recently built a new computer and enabled BitLocker on it. When doing so, it asked me to save my recovery key, but I didn’t have a working printer or a flash drive to hand to save my recovery key to (also it doesn’t seem sane to store the recovery key in cleartext on a USB stick), so I cheated and used Print to PDF to save the recovery key to my OS drive… the one I was encrypting.
A little later I was hardening my security settings and changed the DEP policy to from the default (opt-in) to opt-out. I...