Microcatastrophes

One after another ...

I have been celebrating Angels In America, but underneath this glorious boost there have been a lot of near disasters.

Let’s take a look at this, since it’s been affecting my composure in the negative sense …

Attention Conservation Notice:

Woes, whoopsies, and wasted time. I’m just complaining, don’t listen to me …

Inventory:

This is a boat cat that just became an office cat … because the human that feeds her when I don’t get down there slipped going over the railing, landed face first, and managed to break his neck without damaging his spinal cord. So the boat is gonna get the finishing touches and the someone else can enjoy having a hole in the ocean that doubles as a money shredder. This one has paid for itself, but it’s not an experience I care to repeat. And ftr she’s not at all pleased, because she’s sharing space with Mr. Personality, who’s got five pounds on her and he’s not impressed with her attitude.

I had some loose carpet go out from under me right at the end of September and then I put the finishing touches on with another fall three weeks later - hairline fracture of the wrist for my dominant hand. I take it off for typing, then I do something physical, and extend the healing process a bit more …

This is (or at least was) the boot drive for my Proxmox 8.4.14 system, after last night’s attempt to move it to the new Z4.

This was listed as a fanless Nvidia GT 730 on the Ebay listing. It’s going back and I guess that’s OK - it’s doublewide, the PCIe connector is on the wrong side for the little Dell, and it didn’t come with a full height back plate, so I can use it in the Z4 …

And since I let the GTX 1060 from the old HP go today before being sure the RTX 5060 would work with the new HP’s power supply, I can only have just one of those two machines working.

Things that should take a few minutes to put in motion with an rsync are now going to be, thanks to the dead boot drive and the inability to run more than one machine at a time, an enormous muddle that will consume my entire day. I guess I should be glad I got the one irreplaceable thing from the old Promox machine cloned to the new little EliteDesk. This I did just as a Promox cluster experiment, but now it’s a precious running backup of the impossible to repair Open Semantic Search VM.

And adding insult to injury … the enter key on my new keyboard sticks, so I ordered replacement … which is taking two weeks to arrive due to tariffs.

Taking Stock:

Doing a Proxmox 8.4.14 to 9.0.3 upgrade was ahead of me, now I’ve got to recover one VM and just rebuild fresh all the work I did last week. This isn’t the worst thing, it’ll all be cleaner for it.

There is only one machine in this place that will not boot from NVMe right now, the little Optiplex 9020, and I just learned all it needs is a BIOS update. This means instead of trying to find increasingly rare NOS Seagate Nytro drives, everything can be converted to the inexpensive, readily available Western Digital Red NAS NVMe drives.

The HP Z4, HP EliteDesk G5, and Dell Optiplex 9020 trio are a quorum - I can build a proper Promox cluster, as well as any high availability stuff in Kubernetes - the N/2 + 1 voting will work as required.

Conclusion:

Normally stuff like this passes largely unnoticed. I’m writing about it today because 1) it’s been a big run of WTFs, 2) a dozen people have signed up for Claude Camp, 3) a couple have provided Amazon gift cards, and 4) I think a couple others are going to also do so.

That new Z4 feels like an absolute rocket compared to the Z420, and that’s with the least capable process in it. At the rate the Amazon cards are piling up, it’ll be a six core 96GB machine with a proper boot drive later this month.

I don’t need a lot to make magic, but snappy performance and bullet proof storage ARE requirements. And we’re almost there …