Coyote's Blog

The computer proliferation problem This post describes my experience and some choices that I made. It is a personal choice and I'm not saying that this the 'best way' (tm) to solve this problem, just that it is one of the possibilities. I'm sure a lot of parents can relate to this. Back then, life was simple: my kids would use the media library, surf the InterNet from the PC in the living room and type their documents on that box. The documents would be saved in a shared folder on the home RHEL Cluster and backups would hum at night. Then, little by little things became more complex. The teenagers got their first laptops and life was good.. for a short while. I had agreed to keep the laptops under Windows (10). This made -my- life simple since patching firmwares/BIOS on Lenovo laptops is very Windows-friendly. Since they had to use Microsoft Office for school, having that suite on their personal computers allowed them to work efficiently and occasionally play s...

 I recently got a Unifi US-16-XG  to create a 10G backbone in my Lab/Home Infra. I love the switch but the 30mm fans make too much noise for my taste and I decided to mod the switch. This was one of the easiest mods I had ever done. Here's the shopping list: - Two unique 30mm to 40mm 3D printed from a friend or a 3D shop in your neighborhood. I placed a copy of the 3D models I used <here> . The official link is here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4143421 - Two Noctua 40mm PWM fans (Model: NF-A4x20 FLX) - Two Noctua Ultra-Low-Noise adapters (NA-RC-12) - a Philipps screwdriver :) Here are a few pictures from the Build: US-16-XG with the original Fans: These are standard 3-pin connectors, no soldering required. Positioning the air ducts: Assembling the anti-vibration fan mounts: Final fan position after cutting the anti-vibration mounts. I tried using the US-16-XG without low noise adapters. I didn't quite like it (still too noisy). I tried the low-noise adapters from N...

Rationale  As much as I liked my T4X0 machines (T430, T440) with RHEL, I started to feel limited in terms of PCIe slots, HDD bays, DIMM slots and CPUs. I have slowly started to decommission the T4X0 machines to replace them with T6X0 machines. The T640 was a little more difficult to make into a silent workstation than the T630's so here are a few notes to help others: CPUs Nothing fancy here. The T640 accepts cpus up to 205W so I went for that. If your CPUs are above 165W each, make sure to get a pair of high wattage heatsinks from Dell ( Dell P/N:  0VX3D  ) Here's a 0489KP heatsink (stock, left) next to a K2PNJ heatsink (right). RAM Most of the Xeon Scalable 2nd Gen literature mentions DDR4-2633 or above but 2400 and 2133 LRDIMMs do work fine too. I'm currently using 16 x 32gb 2133MHz LRDIMM with my Xeon Platinum 26C/52T 8269CY CPUs: # memconf   memconf:  V3.15 16-Jul-2019 http://sourceforge.net/projects/memconf/ Dell Inc. PowerEdge T640 (2 X 26-Core Hyper-Th...

Introduction As a technical consultant, an important part of my daily activities is being able to develop code or customization for the customer I'm working with. Quite often, this means working extra hours in lab environments to make sure we have a 100% reliable, reproducible and idempotent software change. If you're worked with 'Red Hat OpenStack Platform' after version 7, you probably know that a Director-based deployment of RHOSP can be quite time-consuming and may involve some decent amount of trial-and-error. At the same time, if I only wanted to test a specific feature in a lab, it may take me a few hours to launch a complete environment to try that feature out. This was beginning to become very time-consuming, even with powerful hypervisors. So, I came up with the crazy idea to make my life easier and use a gitlab pipeline to deploy RHOSP so I didn't have to perform the pre-required steps manually. Defining the Production Chain Here's the pr...