Nerdzone

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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How to connect your 3rd party router to a Swisscom Fiber connection?

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Recently, we moved our household. Yes, we did. We built a house and we just moved in recently. At the time of writing, it looks like a bomb went off. Cardboard boxes and bags everywhere, furniture not yet at the perfect place, office room not yet ready. But the new cat tree arrived and was installed quickly. Our felines already love it!

Get the internet working!

On the day of moving into the new house, one of my primary tasks was to set up the internet connection and make sure the basic networking and also the TV is working fine. It looked all good when I connected the router. It seemed to have a signal. But when I tried to browse the internet, only a Swisscom landing page was showing up, notifying me that the internet connection has to be activated. What? So that was phone call number one.

I called Swisscom, explained to them what the problem is and if they could help me. They just told me, well, it is not a Swisscom router you have there. And they were right. I’m paying for 10 Gigabit fiber internet. But until the time of moving, Swisscom did not have a router that was capable of bringing that 10 Gig speed also into the home network. So I had to buy another router. It was the Zyxel XGS-PON Fiber-Router AX7501. It is certified by Swisscom, which means that you can use this device for Swisscom fiber internet as well as for Swisscom TV.

Need to pay for support? Not with me!

The guy on the hotline really tried to help, and I appreciate it. But when we reached the root of the cause of “no internet but a Swisscom landing page”, he mentioned that he should connect me with the next level tech support, but that would cost some money. Wait, what? That would be the first time ever since I’m a Swisscom customer, that tech support will cost me money! Well, thanks to the internet, I was able to find a solution. And it was easier than expected.

The solution

Depending on the specific network expansion situation, the Swisscom network supports the following fiber-optic technologies:

  • 10 Gbit/s technology XGS-PON to ITU standard G.9807.1
  • 1 Gbit/s technology point-to-point to IEEE standard 802.3-2008, clause 58, 59

Swisscom explicitly mentions that only routers and modules certified by Swisscom can be connected to the new 10 Gbit/s technology (XGS-PON). And the Zyxel AX7501 is one of the supported routers, probably the only one available currently. But that doesn’t mean that it is just plug-and-play. You can connect everything and the router also gets a signal, but there is no internet except the Swisscom landing page.

So what should I do?

There are two settings that have to be set in the WAN connection settings of the router. Probably settings that the original Swisscom router already has set.

First, you have to set the DHCP option 60 to the value “100008,0001”. Next, you have to set the VLAN ID to VLAN ID 10. That’s it. Save the configuration, and that should already do the trick. Try to browse a website now, it should show up.

A bit of googling saves you the money for paid support, since the information is obviously publicly available. But you first have to realize that such settings are necessary.

Source of information: Connecting external routers to the network – Help | Swisscom

Update on website performance and security

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Long time no hear! My last blog post has been a while ago, I’m sorry for that. I may have mentioned possible reasons for that (or maybe excuses) in some other posts already. I’m busy in the office, and when you’re working as a customer, there is not the same level of troubleshooting (and thus the source for blog posts) as when you would work as a partner (vendor => partner => customer, from an IT tech perspective). I know, that might be only an excuse. We’ve got plenty of servers, stuff in the cloud, and therefore one may say there are plenty of problems. But no, there’s not much. Honestly. But anyway, I’m still keeping the troubleshooting stuff on my radar, and if there will be some good and beefy issues, I’ll document that and blog about it. Because in IT, you’ll be probably not alone with that problem. And any blog post can help.

What’s up then?

Today’s topic is not about virtualization, networking, storage, or anything else in that sphere. It’s about an update on my website’s performance and security.

Recently we had a discussion in our team on how to improve website performance in general, how complex it could be, what solutions could be applied, and who should be on board with such a project. After the “official” part we had a chat in our core team about our personal websites, website monitoring, performance, etc. and we stumbled across some speed test websites. I mean, we’re all somehow nerds, isn’t it? No offense!

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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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