Kind: Articles

traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body

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Screen grab depicting blank video player

This morning I saw a post on LinkedIn, linking to this story on TheGuardian.com about John Lewis’s new Christmas ad. In terms of retail in Britain, John Lewis is something of a national treasure.  Sadly, Google’s approach to ad-blocking in YouTube has come to bear: I am unable to watch this advert unless I disable ad-blocking on my browser.

Google disrespects my freedom to choose what content I see in my own browser. In fact, it attempts to deny me it.

Despite having had a Google account for many years, I can see this relationship coming to an end. Big Tech abuses its users in order to stay profitable… and there’s a word for that.

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Online criminals are demanding a ransom from the Kido chain of nurseries after posting images of children on the dark web. Police said officers were investigating.

Source: Hackers claim to have stolen pictures, names and addresses of children in nursery firm cyber attack | UK News | Sky News

Going after images and address information of children is beneath contempt.  So is hosting it irresponsibly. Equal shame on Kido and the hackers that exploited their lax security.

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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.