Battle Ground, SFF-8644

As you won’t remember, I bought a new RAID system to fix a movie backup situation, but then the question became how to have it be silent the 98.7% of the time I’m not actually watching a movie. I determined that one possible way would be to get some more cables, and look! Today they arrived.

Epic unboxing sequence.

Yeah, that looks like I imagined it would look. It’s got an internal MiniSAS connector (SFF-8087) on one side, and an external Mini SAS SFF-8088 on the other side.

Because I already have an internal Mini SAS card (which didn’t fit in the new RAID machine because of space issues).

Let me just test to see whether this cable actually fits the card… Yes!

I love connectors that to “click” when I plug them in. So satisfying.

Anyway, so this is the old RAID setup. Fanless machine on top, two fanless cabinets on the bottom that have four disks each.

And this are the SFF-8088 cable that I have (they have Infiniband SAS connectors at the other end).

This is the LSI MegaRAID SAS 9280-8e that refuses to spin disks down, which is why I want to change it out. (Besides, it’s pretty old — from 2014, and while it’s rock solid while running, one out of ten boots, it refuses to come up, which is annoying.)

Oh yeah… the Mini SAS card is full height, and I need half height. Oops. Do I have some old half height plates lying around? That fit? Those three don’t…

Yes! I found one! It’s for an external card, but eh, whatever.

See? It fits.

So now we come to the eternal dilemma when installing new hardware in a machine: Should I install everything properly before even testing whether the machine boots? Or should I do a test boot without getting my screwdriver out?

If everything works, then of course it’s more efficient to just mount everything properly once. But on the other hand, nothing ever works the first time around, so you’re wasting time — almost certainly.

Eh, I went for it. No tests!

*click* *click*

Yes! Everything fits!

And then the SFF-8088 to Infiniband SAS connectors are plugged in…

Well, that’s promising — and I can hear the disks are spinning up, which is a good sign. I mean, all these various varieties of Small Form Factor SAS are new to me: I don’t really for sure know whether it’s all even electrically compatible. I now have a PCIe card that does SAS/SATA, and has SFF-8087 connectors, to a SFF-8088 female plug, to a male SFF-8088 plug, to a SFF8470 (Infiniband SAS), to normal SATA connectors…

WHAT THE!!! It booted! And the mdraid RAID came up! But it’s an inception of RAIDs: It’s a RAID5 over 8 RAID0 devices, all of which are a single disk.

I didn’t expect the RAID to come up at all, so I’m surprised — I had expected that I’d have to create a new RAID over the disks and then rsync over all the movies from the new RAID system (which would take about about two or three weeks).

But here’s the explanation: The LSI MegaRAID card is not a JBOD card — it’s totally a RAID card. You’re meant to configure it as such, but I swore that I would never, ever use consumer grade RAID hardware ever again, because they often use proprietary formats, so if it dies you can’t necessarily just get another card. And besides, these cards are often pitifully underpowered, so computing the RAID5 checksums becomes a bottleneck — which is absurd. A modern CPU can saturate the disks with data without using more than a couple percentages of CPU power (computing the checksums).

So what I did was to configure each disk as its own “RAID” on the LSI MegaRAID card, and then use mdadm to configure a RAID5 on top of it.

But then it turns out that the MegaRAID card is apparently using mdadm RAID itself? (Perhaps the LSI card itself is a Linux computer?) So Linux recognises each of those separate “RAID” volumes as a RAID0, and then automatically assembled the RAID5 on top of it.

Whodathunk! Not me! But that means that I don’t have to do anything more — I can just let it be the way it is, even though it’s weird?

It’s a bit worrying that it’s also gathered all the sdX devices into an md device — but all as single disks… but it’s inactive, so I guess it’s not… a danger?

Heh, the SAS card comes up as… five PCIe bridges and four SATA devices? But anyway:

Look! The file system mounted fine and everything.

But the point of this was to see whether I could spin the disks down (and up again)…

Yesss… the hum disappeared.

Yes! They came back up again (and it took about 25 seconds to spin up).

Hm… I should try rebooting a couple times to see whether the RAID system comes back up again reliably… *time passes* Yup. (And the SAS card boots fast — the LSI card used five minutes to boot.) So:

SUCCESS! I think I have the perfect solution (again) — I was experimenting with suspend/hibernate and Wake-on-LAN on both the new and old RAID machine, but with this, I don’t have to do anything — when I access the movie NFS-mounted disks, I have to wait 25 seconds to start watching a movie (if it’s been a while since the last time), but otherwise I don’t have to have to do anything — the disks will spin down when they’ve been idle for a few hours.

Wow, it’s nice when a badly made plan pans out.

Book Club 2025: Åke Jävel: Kuken by Lars Sjunnesson

Åke Jävel is a character that Sjunnesson uses in his comics, and his bon mot (so to speak) is “kuken!”, which means “the cock”. (Or perhaps “the dick”.) This book purports to be a collection of the poetry written by the man this character is built on. So:

(“The cock is democratic”, etc.)

Then there’s a text at the end about how Sjunnesson came to have the manuscript(s) for this book and all that jazz. It’s a fun little object. I got it from here, included with some comics I bought. Thanks!

And it’s one of those rare books that has a perfect 5.00 rating on Goodreads! (Heh heh.)

Åke Jävel: Kuken I-III (2023) by Lars Sjunnesson (5 on Goodreads)

Filtering data centres from web stats

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing weird stuff popping up in my WordPress Statistics for Emacs buffer (that I wrote about here). It’s like the above — a bunch of hits for the same page, using the same identical User-Agent, in a short time period, from different IP addresses (if they’d used the same IP address, they’d already be filtered out). The User-Agent doesn’t announce that it’s a bot (bots are filtered out already by wse), but is instead something like:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.6778.33 Safari/537.36

I finally broke down and investigated… and it turns out that those IP addresses are from Azure. So this is probably some kind of AI-scraping bot? I guess Copilot is going to become more adept at writing smart-ass articles about obscure comics or somethings.

The sensible thing would, of course, be to ignore all this, because who cares. On the other hand, it made me wonder whether it was possible to whip something up to ignore all visits from data centres when doing the stats… and somebody has helpfully made a list of all CIDRs for Azure/AWS/etc.

But I’m unable to find anything to cover all data centres — and that list is IPv4 only, which is weird. Don’t any of these services use IPv6 yet?

Anyway, after doing some typing:

(wse--data-center-ip-p "40.122.184.170")
=> "Azure"

(wse--data-center-ip-p "80.91.231.1")
=> nil

It works!!!

(Hm… I feel I’ve written a CIDR function like this before, but I can’t find it now.)

So how big is the problem really?

Oh, it’s 6% of page views. That’s not so bad. However, this is just AWS/Azure/CGP/Cloudflare — it doesn’t cover the rest. So my question is — does anybody have a complete data centre CIDR list? And howabouts them IPv6es?

Random Comics

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the past few days.

I think the translation of Svetoft’s Spa (from Fantagraphics) got a bit of attention last year?

This is very different — it’s more of a shaggy dog gangster/heist/macduffin thig…

But with the grotesques you’d expect.

It’s good — it’s funny, unsettling, kinda exciting. But I have to say that I was more confused than the author had even intended (and I think a lot of the confusion was intended). But there’s two dozen characters, and they mostly look like random variations. That is, they all have distinctive features, but from a very limited palette, so you have to concentrate on like “right, that’s the one with the stache and the square glasses and the grey hair, not the one with the stache and the round glasses the and black hair”.

This is a very handsome book. For the first couple of years, New York Review Comics books were kinda indifferent physically (while they reprinted excellent stuff), but that’s changed — more care is being taken these days.

The reproduction on this is great.

So, McMillan is somebody I’ve encountered in some 70s underground comics, but haven’t really paid much attention to. His comics are quite interesting, but to me, they lack a sense of direction — sure, they’re pleasantly absurd and way out there, but…

Anyway.

I’ve been slacking off on my French comics reading the past month, but I got three Spirous done the past few days.

The special issue on The Smurfs was smurfin’ hard to smurf, because of all the smurf.

These are three pretty good issues, but as usual, The Fabrices win.

There’s something about the format of these DC collection that make me pick them up, even though I don’t really have much hope that they’re going to be, like, good…

This collection starts with Batgirl #7, because I’m sure that makes lots of sense.

But this was actually not bad. I mean, I couldn’t really tell what all the drama was about, because it seems like there’s a gazillion plot threads from 75 years of continuity being spun here, but that’s fine.

So I read half the book before I realised that I didn’t really care, and then I dropped it, but it’s not bad. It moves fast. I think my main problem ended up being the artwork, which doesn’t do anything for me.

Yes! I got a ton of floppies.

Of them, the Ryan North crossover continues to entertain.

I found the humour in this Lower Decks issue to be pretty strange, and then I realised that it’s because Ryan North has left the book. I mean, it’s not bad or anything, but…

It’s annoying when the creators you follow drop out, but I guess the super-hero books North are writing pays 100x for 100th of the work required (jokes are hard), so I’m not surprised.

Al Ewing/Steve Lieber’s Metamorpho gets even weirder. I know! It shouldn’t be possible, but it is. It’s very good.

I don’t know exactly why I picked this up…

… but I’m totally impressed by the artwork. It’s very now.

It’s very… Moebius via Simon Roy? With more than a dash of James Stokoe? Or something? Whatever the inspiration, it looks totally on point. It’s fun to look at, and it reads so well.

The story, on the other hand… well, it’s not bad? It’s very… uhm… Yeah, it’s basically The Incal, but different. Private dick, love interests, MacGuffins, betrayals, cosmicness… all that stuff. It’s pretty good.

This is a strange one.

It’s slice of life humour from a Swedish comics artist who lives in Japan. So she does these things that are about how strange Japanese customs seem to her (or vice versa).

These were published in Japan first, and there’s half a dozen volumes out, apparently? So it’s a success. However, I just found it kinda… eh… The things she points out are so obvious — there’s nothing really interesting? And the way it’s presented is also just so… OK, there’s four panels per “issue” she’s explaining. And then there’s a single panel “after comic”, and then there’s that speech bubble in the left hand corner where she basically reiterates what she’s just told us.

Like a recap. As if this is going to be on a test.

It’s maddening, so I tried skipping that bit while reading the book, but I still only lasted 50 pages.

OK, that’s it.