Hello, dear reader, and regardless of how amazing of a dumpster fire 2022 has been so far, I hope that you are doing good or at least holding on... And remember - "Putin du bist so 1 pimmel"
As I mentioned in the last post, which I surprisingly ended up making public sooner than expected, I had a trip to India planned. And, well it did actually happen! As usual, there were some hiccups along the way, like the Omicron variant causing panic and changes in the regulations less than 1 week before my scheduled flight, but in the end, it wasn't too bad for me.
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| Photo of the Immigration counters one day before my scheduled flight. And this was during peak Omicron In fairness, for whatever reason, the next day when I arrived, I literally sailed through this within 2 minutes. |
Also, I don't really have a lot to report on the robot project thing, partially because it's still in the embargo, partially because we haven't really made too much noteworthy progress in terms of the robot, and partially also because I was on vacation. So, apologies if you were hoping to get more updates on that front.
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| Cryptic proof that the project is, as 20syl likes to say, an Ongoing thing, I love my own puns. |
But, there is quite a lot that happened during my visit. So much so, that I might just have to split up all that I want to talk about over at least 2 posts, maybe more, depending on how rant-y I feel about things. I would like to start off with networking and servers because they somehow still manage to catch my attention over all the other little interesting tech titbits floating around. As you may or may not recall, there was an old HP laptop with a strapped-on intel LGA775 cooler on it which was being repurposed as a NAS and media server in my house. Even back then I knew it was not an ideal situation, and using something that's scrapped together to store data reliably was never a solution, let alone a good one. But I just did not realize how bad the whole situation can get if allowed.
I was getting notified frequently by my dad about some issues and problems with the server over the last 2 years, and at one point it straight up was not working. The fans were spinning but the drive was not being displayed over the network on any devices. Since I was in a time crunch, I just said screw it, just turn it off for now. I will check it in person when I visit.
Fast forward to my visit, The laptop was draped with dust, and the WD Blue HDD that I had bought less than 2 years ago, just before leaving for my studies, was dead. Like properly dead. Not even spinup sounds, no detection even in the BIOS of multiple devices. Yes, I know, WD Blue is not really server-grade or even high-performance desktop-grade, but I still have not figured out any understandable reason why the HDD died. The system was functioning properly when I left it, the wiring was correct, the laptop was always on dual redundant backups, first from an inverter and then from a local UPS with apcupsd daemon monitoring the battery stats. My only explanation would be the drive getting corrupted and probably also some hardware failure because of a couple of hard resets that needed to be done or accidental sudden power losses. That's why one should always unmount the drives before powering them off. Thankfully, I don't really think any critical data was lost. It was lost, sure, but because I knew the delicacy of the system, I had backups of almost all the things elsewhere.
But I digress. Since I already knew things were going to be bad, I had bought 2 WD Red Plus 4T drives from Mindfactory.de here in Germany and placed an order for the Synology DS220j directly over in India.
Now, please do not treat this as a review, because I am maybe 30-40% familiar with the overall functionality that Synology and DSM (its software) provides, but I LOVE IT! Coming from a frankly horrible GUI of OpenMediaVault or OMV, DSM is just leagues ahead. To be fair, OMV is an open-source thing and Synology invests quite a lot of money into DSM, something like 40% of the cost of the NAS is hardware, and 60% of what you pay for is the software, and it totally shows. It is beautiful, intuitive, easy to use, clearly explained, and more important but also often overlooked, extremely well documented. I have a feeling that even non-tech people would not face too debilitating troubles if all they want to do is a simple NAS system with storage accessible over their entire network.
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| So much cleaner, and maybe also room for expansion? |
But, it gets better.
Not only does the NAS acts as a NAS, which you would expect as a bare minimum, the software work that has gone into DSM clearly shows. There's a license for 2 IP Cameras that you can use for surveillance purposes, with motion detection, geofencing, alerts, and all kinds of cool stuff included with every NAS. You can buy licenses for more cameras if required. There's Synology photos, which although I have not used very extensively, based on my little personal experience and also from review on the interwebs, is the closest competitor to Google Photos. That in itself is high praise because Google Photos is perhaps the best service Google has made public. There also is DSM video and music apps that act like your own personal Amazon Netflix and Spotify, the only difference being that all the music and videos that you want to watch or hear are stored locally on your own device and there is no ads or behavior tracking or preference data mining being done on you.
And what probably is my favorite is the Quickconnect tech offered by Synology. Usually, if you want to access your NAS from anywhere outside of your house, you would have to set up DDNS, port forwarding and VPN connections to do that, and from experience, or lack thereof, it has not been particularly reliable for me. Quickconnect on the other hand bypasses all of this and routes all of the requested traffic over a kind of proxy address through Synology's main servers. That means I can connect to the NAS in my house in India, from here in Germany, stream movies and music from India to here, share files, and backup the photos I take from my phone here directly to my own server in India without any problems whatsoever. It has been 3 months and I have not faced any problems so far. It has been "set it and forget it" and I respect it for that. Major props to the software dev team over at Synology. I am a fan and I would recommend anyone looking for a NAS solution to seriously consider their products. My personal recommendation would be the DS220+ instead of the DS220j because of additional performance, transcoding of video streams, and the ability to run docker. It is almost double the price of the 220j, but depending on your requirements, it might be worth it.
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| You can't see the Pi, but it is stuck with the back panel using some double-sided tape, controlling the printer and also running PiHole |
Do note that you have to buy your own HDDs, and I have been generally happy with WD devices. Again, make sure you get the CMR drives and not the SMR drives for your NAS. There was quite a kerfuffle about WD sneaking in SMR drives, which are not really suited for all types of NAS use, inside their NAS drives lineup without proper identification and notification. Long story short, look for WD Red Plus or Red Pro, Seagate Ironwolf, or Toshiba enterprise drives like N300. Backblaze and Anandtech are your friends here.
On the little titbit of tracking and mining of personal data... I was not able to connect the Synology NAS to my very old HP printer (LaserJet 1020), so I had to use a Pi as a CUPS print server. I also installed Pi-Hole on there for a network-wide AdBlock on all the connected devices and HOLY CRAP!
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| Indian PiHole instance |
India, I know you are a terrible country with no regard for human life, even lower regard for privacy, and insatiable lust to rip the common man for profits, but damn! Even with a "mild" block list of about 500,000 URLs and trackers in the PiHole blacklist, I have consistently been getting over 60% of the requests as being blocked. Seriously, what is going on? And then when I upgraded to fiber internet (Oh yeah, 100Mbps symmetrical connection, actually needed for all that streaming and NAS shit), you don't allow me to even change basic settings on the router that's provided? I'll give a pass on distributing ZTE routers, which I think along with Huawei are still banned in the great 'Murcia, but not informing customers about even the possibility to change settings and actively hiding the router config page from end-users, instead suggesting them to use the app to change the WiFi name and Password, as if that is the only thing that you need to configure properly on a residential network where there are cameras, smart speakers, all mobile devices which are more and more commonly used to do financial transactions... Come on! At least pretend that you care about security? Oh and good luck trying to update the router firmware for new exploits that are found every single second.
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| Meta, Google, and Microsoft. Why? |
For context, PiHole here in Germany which I am currently using has over 1.5 million addresses in the blocklist, and the worst I have seen is 40% blocked. (Thank you Windows 10, and I will upgrade to Win11 when you are truly dead, or just switch permanently to Linux, which never goes above 20% on this stat)
Apart from the difference in the blocklist domains, the PiHole I am using here is used by 4-6 people (more on that in the next post maybe), but the one in India is exclusively used by 2 persons...
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| Stats of the German PiHole |
Also, for some reason, IPv6 blocking for PiHole was not working properly for me, for whatever reason, and since I had only gotten barely familiar with the IPv4 stack, I straight up decided to disable IPv6 DHCP handling on the main fiber DSL thing. It was not a problem with my old copper telephone wire connection stuff, but I guess the new fiber connection is also utilizing IPv6 which the PiHole refused to block. If there is any major downside to disabling IPv6, please let me know.
Quick side note here for Motorola - I have been your customer for a long time, and I appreciate the kind of devices you make, decently powerful with actually useful software additions. I also enjoy the Optimized charging which uses "AI and ML" to limit the charging overnight to extend battery life. But why do you have to make almost 800 requests to logx.optimizely.com every 10 minutes when you are optimizing my phone's battery charging in the middle of the night? Not cool.
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| Oh, I also got a Chromebook Duet. Totally forgot about that little thing. It's great for someone who is not a heavy user or just getting into computers, like kids, or my homies who don't care as long as it can run Netflix or YouTube. |
I think this is enough for this particular post for now. I hoped that I would get a nice relaxing time in India and put my mind to rest, but honestly, with all the things that needed to be done over the last 2 years of me not being in India, I barely had time to catch my breath. I did get a vertical monitor and a proper VESA mount upgrade for my workspace there, so that is cool.
And it would be criminal of me to not mention the wonderful Sony's 1000XM4 over-ear headphones that for the first time, allowed me to actually have a sound sleep in the total of 16 odd hours I spent in the Dreamliners. *Chef's Kiss*
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| Good luck to the Tata conglomerate with the revival of the Maharaja Get some more Dreamliners and A350 XWBs in the skies |
Once again, sticking to the template, the music suggestion would be a bit more Blues and Country music-themed. Coming Home by Leon Bridges. Other suggestions would be Louis Armstrong's What a wonderful world and Frank Sinatra's My Way. But honestly, if this is the first time you are hearing the name Frank Sinatra, I really question your choices.
Slightly out of the template, would be the "Someone Somewhere" in the title, which sadly is a not perfect but still official translation of Deux Moi, a french movie released in 2019. Highly recommended as well, especially for the absolutely perfect camera angles and cinematic work.
PS- I am now on Instagram @acedexplorerabl, after succumbing to a lack of dopamine in my brain.
Finally, we reach the end, which I would again end in a familiar fashion. Photos from the past year and some from India are attached for your viewing pleasure. I hope you like them, I wish you the best, and I hope to see you here again soon, dear reader.
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| Munster, I believe |
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| If you look closely, an accident is about to happen |
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| Drachenfells, I will return with my bike |
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| Alpine A110, What's not to like? comment subscribe |
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| Dusseldorf, which definitely is not a dorf |
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| As promised, DB Museum of Koblenz. |
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| I did not know about this, but apparently, this train used to be a big deal in the EU |
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| For scale, the wheels are almost 2 meters in diameter. WTF? |
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| Koblenz stadtmitte I think |
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| A cropped view of the Deutsches Eck |
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| /shruggie |
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| Sector 17, Chandigarh |
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| That's Rava Dosa (South Indian) at the top, Chole Bhature (Punjabi Cuisine) at the bottom, and a glass of Lemon soda on the side. Total cost? 4 Euros. |
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| Naan or as non-Indians know it, Naan bread, with creamy tofu curry |
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| Street vegetable vendor |
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| For a handheld shot, I think this is pretty good, no? |
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| Ignoring the water tanks, the view of the nearby Himalayas was particularly exciting. The view was better from my old place in Chandigarh, but this is still better than nothing, so I'm not complaining. |
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| Dhaula Kuan Metro Overpass Good idea, shit implementation, typical India |
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| Frankfurt Flughafen Bahnhof On my way back home, to Aachen :) |
I am not sure what I would want to write about the next time, as claimed above... But let's see how things go ahead.
Comments and feedback, as excessive as they have been over the last 3 years on this blog, are still very much appreciated.
Thanks again for your time. :)
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