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As with all its services, Apple offers no real troubleshooting when iCloud Drive synchronization stalls in macOS. Glenn Fleishman encountered a problem that took months to diagnose and fix. In the process, he went through the wringer of trying nearly everything suggested online, via Apple support, and from colleagues. In the end, the magic that fixed it was undisclosed engineers.

Source: Cloudy with a Chance of Insanity: Unsticking iCloud Drive – TidBITS

A landmark local to me, featured as stylish content to promote WordPress’s Special Projects.

Every evening, a herd of deer bounces merrily across the fields of Heckfield Place during dinner. There seems to always be a sprinkle of magic—you can almost imagine Alice in Wonderland sitting ami…

Source: The Importance of Sustainable Cooking at Heckfield Place – COOL HUNTING®

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Stripped-down HP MicroServer showing a red LED (critical error)

After half-term week, where the hope of getting “adulty” things done gently fades into obscurity, I was chomping at the bit to crack on with tasks. I had various tasks ahead of me:

  • Strip down and attempted to repair MS03
  • Install on three MicroServers
  • Tidy and organise all cabling at the back of the cabinet
  • Factory-reset the

Sick server

A little background: I obtained three (Gen8 – N54L) servers on Ebay for a compelling price, each with 16GB memory. The intention was to set up a lower-power for development and testing.  I also didn’t have a single machine powerful enough, and capable of being upgraded with enough memory, to virtualise this.

HP Microserver N54L mainboard with PCIe network cards installed
Laid bare: N54L Microserver system board

The HAL (red) light in the featured image … this is basically the server telling me it’s poorly. I’ve replaced the CMOS coin battery and also tried resetting the CMOS itself using the CMOS reset jumper position and power-cycling the machine, but to no avail. Perhaps the PSU is borked. I won’t know until I can get my multimeter on the pins, and I won’t do that until I have the PIN-out specs from somewhere…

Better cabling

Blowing my trumpet here, but the cable organisation at the back of the cabinet is a million times better. Literally a million. Ok, perhaps a few hundred. I know, I know … “photo or it didn’t happen”. I’ll get around to it.

Other tasks & things

  • Proxmox is now on three Microservers – hurrah
  • Discovered that #USB sticks can go into ReadOnly mode (the whole stick, not just a partition/mount).  This can happen if the stick is beginning to fail.
    • This discovery was prompted by the fact that I couldn’t install Proxmox on one USB stick. After reading #reddit on the matter, I have decided to reinstall Proxmox to spinning 3.5-inch disc instead.
  • Firewall – hooray! No need to find the null modem cable and do this via the console / a terminal on another machine – although that would probably have been fun.
  • Giving some thought to the most optimal use of disks. I have so many hard disks, or all ages and capacities. Nearly all of them are SATA; only one PATA drive around now.