Computer

I’m building a new old computer

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Yes, you’ve read that correctly. The title is confusing. I’m building a new old computer. Usually, something is new or old, but it can’t be both. But this time it is indeed both. It’s not directly Schrödinger’s computer, both old and new at the same time. But I think you’ll get the point.

Before we go into this topic: it has nothing to do with virtualization. Well, technically. But first things first.

Many moons ago I stumbled across some Tweets (that was before it was called X) of people gathering old hardware. Pentium III CPUs, old graphics cards like the Voodoo series, or Creative SoundBlaster sound cards. And for sure the very legacy beige computer cases. The good old stuff we all remember. The seed of building such an old computer has been planted a long time ago. And it germinated, grew, and now the young plant is blooming.

I didn’t start directly with gathering hardware and buying shedloads of old stuff. No. I first did some trial & error in my vSphere homelab. Yes. You can install Windows 98 as a virtual machine on your vSphere environment. I’m not saying you should, but it’s possible to do so. Unfortunately, you won’t have sound output, at least as far as I was able to test. So I moved on and set up a virtual machine on VMware Workstation. After installing the right sound driver, there was that iconic Windows startup sound. Oh, how I loved it!

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New homelab hardware installed – HP Z8 G4 workstation

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I may have skipped some homelab generation upgrades in my documentation here. However I have updated the page as far as I could, and I would like to provide you with a brief update on my current homelab setup with this blog post as well.

Last year, my wife and I moved into our own house. Yes, I married my love and we built a house. I didn’t shout about it because it’s something personal and I don’t have to rub it in everyone’s face. But yes, I’m a married house owner now and a loving father. Oh, I forgot to mention that my wife gave birth to a beautiful son this year. So many things happened! But anyway, back to topic.

You may have seen some images I posted on Twitter last year, about the huge IT rack I got my hands on, and the first “production” deployment in my new homelab rack. This “production” deployment was an actual beer fridge that was small enough to fit into that rack. If you don’t believe me, please go ahead and check the pictures here. The beer fridge is still there, but the huge and heavy IT rack has gone. The huge rack has been replaced by a desktop-size rack from StarTech.com. This rack is enough to provide a nice mount for my SuperMicro servers and networking equipment.

But the main topic in this blog post is the recently acquired hardware. I bought a refurbished HP Z8 G4 workstation!

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Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows – The network location cannot be reached

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This blog post is the first with Veeam as a topic for years! I can only hope that it helps at least some people struggling with the same problem I had.

I’m a PC gamer. Still. When I find some time for fun and games, you may find me on the grounds of Battlefield 2042, or maybe I’m driving a tractor in Farming Simulator 2022. My gaming computer is still capable of playing the most recent games. Maybe not with the best graphics and most recent graphic technologies, but they run and make fun.

Anyways.

On this gaming PC, I’ve installed the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows (the free one). Since ages. It works well, but sometimes, the backup fails. Even if you have your games available on demand to be downloaded at any time (Steam, EA, Ubisoft, etc.) and don’t need to install the games from DVDs anymore, it is still annoying if your disk goes bad or something screws up your Windows. I’m using a Synology NAS as my backup target, connected over a 10 Gbit/s ethernet link. The computer itself is equipped with some Samsung NVMe SSDs, so even a full backup is done pretty quickly.

The point is that the computer always takes some time until the network connection is ready and working fine. That’s by design. You log in with Windows Hello, for example, the Desktop is loading, and somewhen the LAN connection is also ready. But Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows already started its job (in case it’s scheduled and if it has missed that time slot) before the network is ready. And this job will fail because the network is not yet ready.

Error: [PCNAME] Failed to get disk free space. The network location cannot be reached.

I searched for a while on the internet and stumbled across a Veeam forum post. There they mentioned enabling the “When backup target is connected” function.

I enabled this feature and tried it out. It worked.

The backup job will now usually succeed.

Yes, usually. Veeam Agent still starts the job before the network is ready (directly after logging in to Windows). And this job may fail. But the job will start again as soon as there is connectivity to your NAS (SMB share). And this time, the job runs just fine and successful.

New Year – New Hosting?

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To make the long story short: this week I moved my blog to a new web host. And I was surprised and pleased with how well and smooth everything went. But I’ll don’t just let you alone here. I’d like to explain the how and why I moved.

When I started with WordPress as my blogging platform, it was all just fun and games. Nothing technical, no helpful blog posts, just tinkering around, having fun writing. But with my engagement in the IT community, with my career in IT, I have rethought. I stopped playing around, and I started writing actual helpful blog posts. I started to write in German because this is my native language. At some time I switched to English, not without a reason (or more actually more than one). I have often dealt with English-speaking customers, with hotlines from international companies. And today at my current employer, English is the de-facto standard when opening tickets internally, or talking to other people in different time zones. I switched to English because most of the IT people I know, personally and on various social media, are native English speaking or understand English. Maybe I also switched because of reaching more people with helpful blog posts. And when I check the blog statistics, most visitors are from the United States. So, not a wrong decision at all, switching to English.

But enough of the forewords.

The why

When I moved my blog from one host to the other back in the days, I was looking for more speed. If you know WordPress, then you know it’s all PHP and MySQL, which can be highly dynamic content. And from a webserver perspective, dynamic content can’t be delivered as fast as static content. But, in my humble opinion, that was back in the days when there wasn’t much SSD storage in the webservers, or it was expensive, or with old PHP versions, etc.

My previous web host had also WordPress, but not the traditional way. He offered static WordPress hosting, which made me curious, and I wanted to give it a try. You’ll get a WordPress instance which you can start whenever you want, write your blog posts, do the other stuff, and shut it down. After that, you’ll create a so-called artifact, which renders all the dynamic content from your blog into static files. All your text, CSS, and JS files, images, etc. will then be put onto Amazon CloudFront automatically. And that’s the static content you’ll get presented when visiting the website. The performance was good, good enough for me.

But it has also some downsides. Some native WordPress features, like comments, search, or some plugins, just don’t work like this. They can’t be static because they relate to the dynamic WordPress in the backend. I had to find solutions for many problems. And I’m still not sure, even if I was able to test it successfully if it really worked.

I decided to move back to my original web host, where I have my domain running since 2008. Not only because of that but also because of the aforementioned circumstances. I’m also born in Switzerland, and my blog has a Swiss TLD (.ch), but with that TLD it’s still (highly) visible also international. My new web host caught me with a good hosting package, which has 250GB of website storage and is backed by 100% NVMe SSD, with Nginx and Apache running in parallel, 50MB of Nginx cache, and many other things. And that for a reasonable price, at least by Swiss standards. Yes, it may be true that many things are more expensive in Switzerland than abroad. But not everything.

That’s the why.

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Enable Flash Player in Google Chrome 69

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Some weeks ago Google released the newest version of their Chrome browser, version 69. I thought yeah, get it and update it. I really like Google Chrome because it supports all the websites I’m visiting often (or at least did, but more on that later) and it’s fast. You can also customize it with plugins like mouse gestures or so to customize it for your needs. What I didn’t know is that Google switched off the support for Flash Player as far as I knew it from the older versions. You aren’t able anymore to add websites to the allow or deny list in the Flash settings within the browser. Or at least you can’t add the websites directly on that list in the settings. There are some more clicks to do. Officially announced was the end of Flash Player by Adobe. By the year 2020, Flash Player won’t exist anymore, won’t be supported by Adobe nor by the most used browser software. But there’s a “but”. You can manually add specific websites to the allow or block list of Google Chrome, but not in the way you might know. But why the heck should I use Flash anyway? All my favorite websites are already HTML5 compatible and all stuff works without that crappy Flash plugin! But wait! Do you use the VMware vCenter browser client? Probably the Flex Client because you still have the need for it, like vSAN, Update Manager, or 3rd party plugins of different software and hardware vendors within vCenter? Then you’ll have the same issues as I had. The vCenter Flex Client (aka Flash client) obviously won’t work anymore without Flash. Yes, I know, you don’t need to use the Flex Client for vSAN or the Update Manager because in vCenter 6.7 it is finally available. But what about the 3rd party plugins? There is a lot of stuff out there you probably need, I don’t know your infrastructure. I can only compare with mine. But I can tell you, enabling Flash Player in Google Chrome, even in the most recenter version 69 is easier than you think. It’s just some steps and clicks, no rocket science!

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