The Slow Web would be more like a book, retaining many of the elements of the Popular Web, but unhurried, re-considered, additive. Research would no longer be restricted to rapid responders. Conclusions would be intentionally postponed until sufficiently noodled-with. Writers could budget sufficient dream-time before setting pixel to page. Fresh thinking would no longer have to happen in real time.

I’ve been reading up on the “smol web” movement for some time – authors going back to self-publishing blogs, syndicating by choice, and choosing to post to independent sites. I’ve run this blog since 2001, and it’s taken on several incarnations – a daily blog a la LiveJournal, a photoblog, a landing page for my consulting business, and a place for me to store information I thought might fall off the web.

I started a mostly-text blog on my tilde using Blosxom, a blogging platform I’d played with back in the 2000s. While it’s an interesting exercise, it mostly serves as an echo of what my LiveJournal was.

I’m thinking of streamlining this blog, sorting out the technical blog entries into their own blog and making this more personal, more writing-focused.

I have a couple of paid LLMs – Microsoft CoPilot for 365 as part of a subscription, and Perplexity (I have a 3 month free trial program). I started playing with them to see how they could benefit.

I wanted to research a science-fiction book I’d read as a teenager, I only knew the name of one of the races in book, and tried Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT and CoPilot. Only ChatGPT pulled up the book title and author, along with a summary – and this was the free ChatGPT version.

I assume that’s more a function of the training library, not the LLM itself.

Then, I tried giving them outlines of plot ideas to write – Gemini came in last, the others were comparable. As a last task, I asked them all to write a 500-word short story about an astronaut stranded on Mars, with elements of the story Robinson Crusoe on Mars and The Martian.

ChatGPT felt more nuanced, CoPilot even used the names of the sources in the story. Perplexity felt like a direct-to-dvd version of “The Martian” that you’d see one on of those free channels on Roku.

I think I’ll use CoPilot when writing, I like the idea of training it on my own documents and having it easily identify my writing style and body of work out of the box.

A thrift-store Synology NAS, “parts-only” Thinkpad laptop with a cracked screen and broken keyboard, and a $5 goodwill router, flashed with OpenWRT forms the basis of my home network. Proxmox, a free hypervisor  allowed me to test LXC and docker containers, block ads on my network with Pi-Hole, run a test Windows Active Directory environment, run Windows95 as a client VM, and host my BBS on this collection of cast-offs.

I’m happy with it, and am always looking for new ways to upgrade on the cheap.

I’ve wondered if I could add another hard drive to the system, or speed up the storage.

I found this post after a web search – apparently, Thinkpads support SATA Express, an older technology meant to bridge support between SATA and NVMe drives. The drive interface is backwards compatible with SATA, but provides 2 PCI-x lanes (instead of 4 with native NVMe).

While a compromise, it appear to be quite a bit faster in testing.

apt update; apt upgrade;pve8to9

Then, updated my /etc/apt/sources.list to point to “Trixie” repositories, then ran:

apt dist-upgrade

to run the upgrade process. Admittedly, I’m not running Ceph or Proxmox Backup server, it’s definitely worth checking out the update documentation at https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Upgrade_from_8_to_9#In-place_upgrade.

A quick reboot, just because, and everything was up and running.

A week later, unrelated to the upgrade, I noticed that my secondary PVE server was unresponsive. I saw lots of “read error on drive /dev/sda” messages, and rebooted the server. BIOS complained the boot drive was unavailable. I checked the cables, all seemed fine.Still no boot.

Unfortunately, I’d moved the BBS from the primary server to the secondary server when I did maintenance on the primary, and forgot to move it back. The two VMs running on the secondary were the BBS and Proxmox Backup Server.

I installed a fresh copy of Windows 11 and copied by daily BBS backup (a file backup to my NAS)  to it, got the BBS working.

I took another look at the secondary, reseated everything and now it booted. The PVE gui came up, but the VMs were unavailable.

smartctl -a /dev/sda

didn’t pull up anything out of the ordinary, no remapped sectors, moderate power-up time.

I saw the message:

TASK ERROR: activating LV 'pve/data' failed: Check of pool pve/data failed (status:64). Manual repair required!

Looking at all of the LVM commands, the logical volumes all looked OK. Searching on the web revealed the command:

lvconvert --repair pve/data

After I ran the lvconvert command, the VMs appeared in PVE just fine. I copied the data files from the new BBS VM to the old BBS, and all is back up and running.

This brought up an issue with Proxmox Backup server – since it needs a VM to run, if the host running PBS crashes, how do you restore it? I wasn’t sure if the VM stored metadata in the VM or on the backup media. Hopefully the latter. While the deduplication is nice (the BBS file area is 11 gigabytes and rarely changes) being able to restore a VM directly from any Proxmox VE server is nice. I’ll have to think about what to do in the future.

I suppose I could use the Proxmox built-in backup tool to backup PBS, and PBS to back up everything else.Then, restore PBS from backup (a 2-click process) and restore everything else from PBS.

I run a 2 node cluster without Ceph and HA. One possibility is to add a third node to create a proper quorum and run Proxmox Backup server on that node. If backup metadata is stored on the target media, then an occasional  drive clone would suffice.

Core Updates

The virtualization stack includes:

• QEMU 10.0.2 for better VM performance
• LXC 6.0.4 for improved container stability
• ZFS 2.3.3 with RAID-Z expansion
• Ceph Squid 19.2.3 for distributed storage (useful in clusters)

Storage & Networking

You can now take VM snapshots on thick-provisioned LVM storage, which is helpful if you use Fibre Channel or iSCSI. Proxmox also adds Software-Defined Networking (SDN) features like OpenFabric and OSPF routing—ideal for more complex setups.

High Availability & Monitoring

New HA affinity rules let you control where VMs run in a cluster. Plus, real-time node metrics give better visibility into system performance.

Interface Improvements

The mobile UI has been redesigned, making it easier to manage your lab from a phone or tablet.

Upgrade Notes

If you’re running Proxmox VE 8.4, the upgrade path is well-documented. You’ll want to run the pve8to9 checklist script before upgrading to catch any issues.

• ? Official Release Notes
• ?? Upgrade Instructions from 8 to 9

For homelabbers, Proxmox VE 9.0 offers meaningful improvements without adding complexity. It’s a worthwhile upgrade if you want better performance, more control, and cleaner management tools.

A thrift-store Synology NAS, “parts-only” Thinkpad laptop with a cracked screen and broken keyboard, and a $5 goodwill router, flashed with OpenWRT forms the basis of my home network. Proxmox, a free hypervisor  allowed me to test LXC and docker containers, block ads on my network with Pi-Hole, run a test Windows Active Directory environment, run Windows95 as a client VM, and host my BBS on this collection of cast-offs.

I’m happy with it, and am always looking for new ways to upgrade on the cheap.

I’ve wondered if I could add another hard drive to the system, or speed up the storage. I found this post after a web search – apparently, Thinkpads support SATA Express, an older technology meant to bridge support between SATA and NVMe drives. The drive interface is backwards compatible with SATA, but provides 2 PCI-x lanes (instead of 4 with native NVMe).

While a compromise, it appear to be quite a bit faster in testing.

And, I’ve found adapters that support 2 NVMe drives on one SATA port. Add 2 drives, set up a ZFS pool, on a laptop – the mind boggles.

Key Features of Proxmox Datacenter Manager

1. Centralized Overview: The Datacenter Manager offers a centralized view of all individual nodes and clusters, making it easier to monitor and manage resources.
2. Basic Management: Users can perform basic operations such as shutdown, reboot, start, and remote migration of virtual guests between different data centers.
3. Modern User Interface: The tool features a redesigned front end, optimized for accessibility, speed, and compatibility.
4. Resource Management: It allows for better organization of resources, including hierarchical groups or resource pools, and simplifies adding remotes.
5. Integration with Proxmox VE: For more complex configurations, the tool links directly to the full web interface of Proxmox VE.
6. Future Enhancements: The roadmap includes plans for improved health state overview, support for multiple VRFs across clusters, and off-site replication copies for manual recovery.

The Alpha version of Proxmox Datacenter Manager is available for testing and collaboration. Installation is similar to Proxmox VE Server, with a straightforward process that includes selecting the target disk, configuring network settings, and setting up user credentials.

Proxmox Datacenter Manager is a promising tool for administrators managing multiple standalone nodes or clusters. While still in the Alpha stage, it provides valuable features that streamline administrative tasks and improve resource management. The Proxmox community is encouraged to test and provide feedback to help shape the future of this project.

More information and a download link are available on their wiki at https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_Datacenter_Manager_Roadmap

It looks like there’s a major change coming to one of our favorite repos: Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts Project Update (EDIT) · tteck/Proxmox · Discussion #4009

Recently, TTeck was diagnosed with incurable appendix cancer that has already spread. If you appreciate his scripts, now’s the time to show him some love. TTeck’s work has been a tremendous help to me over the years, probably for you too.

The repository has already been migrated to a GitHub organization and will now be managed by the community (thanks guys).

• Support for Ceph Reef and Ceph Squid
• Tighter integration of the SDN stack with the firewall
• New webhook notification target
  New view type “Tag View” for the resource tree
• New change detection modes for speeding up container backups to Proxmox Backup Server
• More streamlined guest import from files in OVF and OVA

I’ve been extremely happy with my Proxmox instance; I’ve moved quite a few docker containers to standalone LXC containers, configured backups using the built-in tool (I’m going to set up Proxmox Backup Server next…) and gotten more use out of a system that had previously been running one application on bare metal.

Release notes
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Roadmap

Download
https://www.proxmox.com/en/downloads

I’ve been fighting with and against the “New” Microsoft Outlook, as I’ve written about. My biggest issue revolves around the replacement of Outlook’s Tasks functionality with Microsoft ToDo. I use Tasks heavily, sorting by category and using dates to prioritize daily lists.

My email and meeting workflow ties closely to OneNote and Outlook – and I can’t get the same level of integration with the new Outlook.

Windows Central published an article entitled “Microsoft is wrong: The new Outlook for Windows is not ready for prime time”, and after some time trying to work with the new Outlook, it seems that I’m not alone.

From the article:

So, what can Microsoft do to improve Outlook for Windows? First, it should really think about abandoning web tech in favor of a native Windows UI framework such as WinUI 3. I can’t fathom why Microsoft thinks it’s acceptable for a first-party, pre-installed, essential Windows app such as a mail client to not showcase the best of Windows. 

Second, it needs to support basic touch functionality at the very least. Microsoft’s best-selling PC is a tablet called the Surface Pro, and now that device is going to suffer significantly when it comes to reading email in the default Windows client. It’s just shocking.

Third, it needs to be faster and lighter. If it’s not as fast as the old Mail & Calendar apps, I don’t want it. Those are so lightweight and easy to use, the only problem they have is Microsoft abandoned them. I wouldn’t be mad if Microsoft decided to unabandon them and deliver new features, functionality, and UI improvements to these older apps instead.

In short, I think Microsoft needs to go back to the drawing board. The default Windows mail client should be a native Windows app, not a web app.

[via windowscentral]

“did you see that?”

Hardware

Splurge on keyboards, mice, and monitors.

I’ve managed desktop support for thousands of employees, and one of my tenets was not to scrimp on monitors, keyboards, or mice – they’re what users sit in front of and work with all day. Despite knowing this, I’d gotten by with cheap keyboards and monitors for years. When I started working from home full-time, I decided to upgrade my experience.

I bought an LG 34-inch ultrawide monitor to replace two smaller monitors. I could divide the screen into “snappable” areas with LG’s Screen Manager application. I could administer systems at three different sites and give them each an equal slice of my monitor – or keep a log window open in a corner while I do my work with the remainder of the monitor. Windows 11 has this feature built-in.

I replaced a worn Dell OEM keyboard with a Logitech MX Keys S keyboard. My office is open to the rest of the house, and as much as I like my old IBM Model M keyboard with it’s bucking-spring keys, it was too loud. The MX Keys S keyboard is whisper-quiet, has an action like a really nice laptop keyboard, but with feedback at the end of the key’s travel. I find I’m typing much faster with it.

I swear by the Logitech MX Master 3s mouse. I’ve got a comfortable mouse well-sized for larger hands. Along with the usual two buttons plus a wheel, there are 2 buttons and a roller wheel near your thumb and another button at the base that I use for switching virtual screens.

With the Logitech Options + application, you can program function keys and mouse buttons for various functions, as well as launching a ChatGPT helper.

Both the monitor and keyboard use Logitech’s USB unifying receivers, meaning my home and work PCs only need one dongle to control both keyboard and mouse.

I’ve sworn by the Logitech C920e webcam for years. It’s got a decent microphone which works in a pinch, 1080p video and has worked well for years. This webcam privacy cover is a nice add-on, and looks like it’s part of the camera.

A Blue Snowball iCE microphone is a nice upgrade from a headset microphone. It gives me a nice, warm room sound and it’s small enough that I can place it in front of my keyboard when I’m on calls and it doesn’t show up on camera.

When I’m listening to music or a webinar where I’m not speaking, I use a pair of Jabra headphones with microphone and noise cancelling. I’ve got a homelab running in my office (more on that later) and there are a couple of fans that I can hear when I’m working. The noise cancelling blocks the sound perfectly.

Layout

Keep it clean.

I have a work laptop and a home desktop PC. The logitech keyboard and mouse can each support three devices. The monitor supports two HDMI inputs. When I’m working, I switch the monitor, keyboard and mouse to my work laptop. At the end of the day, switch back to my home PC. It helps me separate work time from home time and saves space on my desk. This helps me set boundaries to limit work to work time and separate work and play in one home office.

Network

There’s no substitute for wired.

Wireless networking is convenient, but when relying on high quality video and audio and working 8+ hours a day from home, wired ethernet. Your wireless router will most likely have 4 wired ethernet ports, if you

Lighting

There’s no substitute for good lighting on video calls.

Office lighting is consistent. My home office lighting was not. I have a skylight, which makes working during the day challenging when the sun is directly overhead. I bought a skylight shade online, which was tricky to install but makes working in the summertime much nicer.

I use Wyze LED bulbs in my floor lamp and track lights. With Wyze’s app, I can tune the color temperature and brightness individually or as a group. At night, I prefer warmer lighting but when on camera during the day want a brighter, whiter light as fill for natural light.

Sound

Next on my list…

I haven’t done anything yet to improve the sound in my home office beyond putting blinds on the windows behind my desk and laying down a rug on the floor. I am going to be ordering these sound baffles to mount to the wall in front of me to help deaden any echoes. Admittedly, it sounds pretty good in here

Software

Keeping organized means getting items out of your head and off of paper and into a digital system.

Work uses Microsoft365. At home, I use Google Workspace. My tasks and calendar are split between them. I use Microsoft OneNote as a place to store notes for both. I’m testing out Notion as a “Second Brain” after reading Tiago Forte’s book, “The PARA Method: Simplify, Organize, and Master Your Digital Life“. Using Notion, I can capture notes for both work and home and build a hyperlinked data library, where I can easily link related notes. Notion is web-based, so I’ll be able to access my data from work or home.

I live in an area with poor cell phone coverage and rely heavily on Microsoft Teams for work calls and Google Voice for home calls.With calls coming in on my headset, I don’t need a desk phone.With Teams, many companies allow you to have a telephone number and call outside your organization; Google Voice allows you to pick a telephone number in any region you’d like.

clunk.

clunk.

One of the drives in my homelab was beginning to fail.

My Proxmox server hosts an Active Directory domain, Windows test environment, LXC containers and Docker containers. It hosts media services, ad blocking and backs up data from my family’s computers.

This “homelab” isn’t one of those half-racks full of industrial-grade servers in closets you see on YouTube. I assembled mine over the years from end-of-life, unwanted and discounted hardware. My primary server is a laptop purchased on eBay for parts, with screen burn in and missing keys. It did, however, come with 20 GB of RAM. My firewall and NAS came from thrift shops. I’d thought about upgrading it, but it serves my needs well and cost less than a used Dell desktop.

Looking at the NAS logs, I saw one drive was logging an I/O error every 30 seconds. One drive might be failing. I deactivated the drive (turns out it was one of the newer white-label drives) and replaced it with a spare I had laying around. Once let the consistency check finished, all was good.

I deactivated the failing drive and replaced it with a spare drive I had laying around. I would have set up a hot-spare, but I needed all of the bays in my NAS.

clunk.

While the NAS drive was beginning to fail, the clunk was coming from an external USB drive used to back up the NAS. The drive was sitting vertically as was designed. I turned it around so the drive lay horizontally, and the noise went away. When I was starting out in IT, we had a superstition about running spinning drives sideways, thinking it could make a head crash easier. Turns out that superstition still lives in the back of my head.

I spent the rest of the afternoon pruning backups, putting a replacement external drive on my Amazon wishlist, and re-routing cables, like you do when you run a homelab.

IBM 360 Mainframe at the Computer History Museum.

• Based on Debian Bookworm (12.5)
• Latest 6.8 Kernel as new stable default
• QEMU 8.1.5
• LXC 6.0.0
• ZFS 2.2.3
• Ceph Reef 18.2.2
• Ceph Quincy 17.2.7

Highlights

• • New import wizard to migrate guests directly from other hypervisors.

    Connect to other hypervisors using their public APIs and directly migrate guests to Proxmox VE.

    First implementation is for VMware ESXi.

    Guests can be started on Proxmox VE while their data is still being imported to the target storage in the background.

More information is available here.

I realized that my blog and this domain (kataan.org) are 25 years old today! I started a project to move the older items from a text archive (downloaded from blogger, remember them?) into my WordPress database. I hadn’t realized that with blogger, I used it like Twitter as a microblog – there are some days where I posted multiple times a day, on different trains of thought.

1999 was an exciting time. I was working in the middle of the first dot-com boom, right in the center of it all in San Francisco’s SOMA district. I quit my job at a gaming company for a jump in responsibility and a share of a streaming music startup right in the middle of the Napster mess. I was in the meeting on business  deals where we danced around money, because no one was sure who should be paying whom. Do we pay for exposure, or do they pay for content?

There were 3 search engine companies within a couple of blocks of me. Hotwired became the cool new site. Friends at web companies were charging clients like they were attorneys, getting them a presence on that web thing that they didn’t understand. South Park, a little green oasis in  the SOMA area of San Francisco became the center of “Multimedia Gulch”. Companies that had been focused on CD multimedia moved to web design and creative services. It all went a little too far. fuckedcompany.com documented some of the excesses, like flake.com, a portal for  breakfast cereal lovers, and a company down the street that had their coming out party on a Tuesday and closed the doors on a Thursday. It’s a shame that fuckedcompany isn’t in the internet archive, it would have been fun to go back and look through the entries.

[oh, the parties – it seemed like someone was getting a round of funding and throwing a party in their converted warehouse/sweatshop space. One of the guys at my startup hosted an email list with all of the “private” parties going on almost nightly in SOMA. The recyclers in the area had a field day with collecting empty beer cans and bottles…]

I started my photography fixation in 1999, shooting street scenes in SOMA and the warehouses converted into “Self-Actualizing Internet Nodes” with a LOMO LC-A, a Soviet-era film camera that became a go-to camera for most of the 2000s.

By mid 2001, the money had started drying up, Aeron chairs and office furniture were available at bargain prices from closed-door dot-coms. 9/11 ended the boom once and for all. A friend of mine, a San Francisco native, went through his address list in 2002 and realized that two thirds  of his contacts had left the city as quickly as they’d come a few years back.

It came in with a bang and left with a whisper. But, it was a good time while it lasted.

Shopping at thrift stores can be a hit-or-miss proposition. My latest find is a Coolpix 5400, a logical progression from my Coolpix 995 and 4300.

This one has the same lens, a 5 megapixel sensor, swaps the swivel-body design for the body-with-grip design that took Nikon through the 2000s, and uses the same batteries as my other Nikons – all with strap, battery and lens cap in great shape for $15.

I’ll take it out for some test shots and write a review shortly.