Author: tsukasa

I am still rocking my beloved Corsair K95 RGB, the original one with the 18 G-keys. I still think there is no keyboard to date that is as great for multiboxing as this one.

Since migrating to my new machine a few months ago, the keyboard would occasionally do quirky things. Letting iCue run for a while caused gamepad detection to “lock-up” and took quite a while. What is worse: No up- or downgrading of iCue made a difference here.

Things like the joy.cpl, GeForce Now, Inner Space or games supporting gamepads would frequently take minutes to load. Disconnecting and reconnecting the keyboard fixed the issue temporarily until something went bonkers again.

The solution to this was to force a reinstallation of the keyboard’s firmware through iCue. I have no idea why I would need to do this, but flashing the firmware again solved the issue permanently.

I have been playing around with Windows 11 in a virtual machine. My thoughts can best be summed up with “a bouquet of unremarkable things nobody wanted”. Windows 11 already made the rounds on the internet over its strict “no old hardware allowed” policy and the back-and-forth over Direct Storage which seemed like nothing more than marketing bullshit.

Personally, I have an entirely different pet peeve with Windows 11: It looks revolting. It looks ugly. It looks disgusting. Windows 11 looks more and more like a failed attempt of skinning Wine to make it hip, fresh and cool. Or like the aftermath of a broken UXThemePatcher run. Or what happens when Window Blinds crashes.

Please remember: People, (presumably) actual living people, got paid to do this.

People that know – or should know – that a majority of old applications will look butt-ugly with a half-assed mix of design elements from Windows 2000 (console contents and some colours), Windows 8/10 (the window controls that were meant for rectangular themes) and the lunacy that is Windows 11.

The colours do not match. The icon language does not match. The margins do not match. Nothing matches.

I do not get to write neat posts nearly as often as I would like to. But this one does not violate any NDAs and is relevant to an OG post on this blog.

So today I want to talk about two things regarding my beloved DS2413+ that other people might find useful in some capacity. Or at least entertaining.

Be Cool, Be Quiet – Live the Noctua Lifestyle!

I replaced the two Y.S. Tech stock fans in my DS2413+ with two Noctua NF-P12 redux-1300. Technically you can pop in every 3-pin 120mm fan you want, however, due to the way Synology drives the fans, they might not drive enough airflow, stop working (as in stop spinning) or DSM complains about fan failure.

I originally intended to replace the fans with the official replacement parts, however, it seems that I got stiffed so procuring the parts on short notice was no option. After a bit of research, I settled on the NF-P12 because other folks around the internet had positive experiences with the swap-out. I used this rare chance to clean the interior of the NAS, routed the cables nicely and thought I was done – I was wrong. I learned that lesson when the unit started beeping in the middle of the night.

You do want to set the fan setting to “Cool Mode” in your power settings, otherwise, one of the fans will randomly stop spinning after a few hours. Setting the fan speed to “Cool mode” fixes the issue and prevents DSM from issuing alarm beeps.

There are some other hacky ways to edit the fan profiles manually via the console, however, this operation apparently needs to be repeated after each DSM update. I’m way too lazy for that.

As for my cool Noctua lifestyle: The temperatures are virtually identical and the fans are quiet (as you would expect from the mighty Austrian owl!).

If you want to live the dream, please be sure to check the web for other people’s reports of your specific unit. Depending on the model the fan size, pin type and compatible fans will vary.

The big question, though: Is it worth the hassle?

Honestly speaking there is very little difference between the Y.S. Tech and Noctua fan in terms of cooling performance and noise level – at least when used on “Cool mode”. But you want that Noctua lifestyle, don’t you?

Addendum 2021-09-13: After upgrading to DSM 7, something about the way the fans are being addressed seems to have changed. I ran into several instances where DSM would report the fan as “faulty” and turned it off completely. Changing the fan settings around does not seem to make a difference here. I have popped in a new set of Y.S. Tech fans (original Synology replacement parts) for the time being…

Data Scrubbing – Or: Dude, Where is my Data?

I run my data scrubbing tasks regularly. Due to a recent power outage, the system complained about possible Write Cache issues, successfully completed a scrub and prompted whether I want to reboot now or later. It also asked whether I wanted to remap the disk.

“Sure”, I thought to myself, “I like maps!”. I toggled the option and hit “Reboot now”. DSM rebooted… and that was about it.

Blinking status LEDs but no DSM web interface, no SMB and no NFS shares. Slightly nervous I tried to connect to the NAS via SSH. dmesg and the system messages did not show anything of particular interest, so I started poking around the internet.

Google spew upon me pages and pages of horror stories that made my skin crawl: Bad superblocks, broken filesystems, complete loss of data, cats and dogs living together – the whole nine yards to make me break into a cold sweat and fear for the worst.

In this case, though, a simple “top” explained the situation: DSM was performing an e2fsck check of my filesystem.

This obviously caused the logical device to be busy or unavailable and explains why all lvs, pvs and vgs commands listed everything to be in order and mdadm was reporting proper operation. This also explains why the shares were not available, as the logical volume was not mounted.

Personally, I find the design decision to not initialize the web interface a bit weird, as it is truly unsettling to see all your data in limbo, with your only indication that something is or could be happening being the blinking lights on the front of the unit (not the drive indicators).

I hope that DSM 7 might improve on that end. It would be cool if the web interface had come up and indicated that a volume is currently unavailable due to running filesystem checks. This would be much more transparent.

Closing Thoughts

The DS2413+ is still an awesome unit and I very much appreciate the stability and ease of use of it. Synology is doing a great job at being very user friendly, so it really hits hard when something like the e2fsck situation comes up.

Good news, everyone! This blog is now also available via Gopher.

I will be working on making the blog look better (as in: remove all the pesky HTML and replace it with proper plaintext) over the coming weeks.

It is honestly great to see that taz.de is still available through Gopher and I hope to join those elitist ranks with a proper and deserving presentation. But until then… please excuse the HTML.

Given the current state of the world, you might be in need of a webcam to participate in meetings and prove that you actually wear clothes and/or pay attention. Given the current state of the world you might also have noticed that webcams have shot up in price.

However, fear not. You can use your smartphone as a webcam. Elgato is currently shilling EpocCam for iPhones, which is what lead me to take a look at these applications in the first place. One of the more popular solutions for Android seems to be Droidcam. There is an early access version that is specifically tailored for use with OBS called Droidcam OBS. However, for a solution aimed at streamers, this software gets it wrong so very very badly.

So, what is wrong with the software? Well, it comes with its own OBS plugin to feed the data into OBS, however, misses out on the most basic of the basic things any OBS user would expect: A way to actually change white balance, exposure and focus from within the plugin. In its current state, the video transmission works beautifully with a stable framerate at great performance. However, there are no remote controls that allow you to change the camera settings.

An app that is designed specifically so you can use the back camera of your phone as a webcam expects you to fiddle with a touchscreen on the front which you cannot possibly use when putting the phone in it’s intended capture position. All while the image within the smartphone app is only visible after you have already connected to OBS.

Now I can already hear you typing away “but Tsukasa, if you connect a camera to a Camlink you also have to set the parameters on the camera, you dummy”. This is true. But this is not a Camlink. This is a two-way communication that only works if OBS instructs it to. In other words: There is a channel that could potentially be used for these tasks.

But hey, the app is still in early access, so perhaps this will come at a later date. And surely other solutions offer remote adjustment of the camera parameters, right? Wrong. All the solutions I tested either expect you to fiddle with the touchscreen within the app on your phone or simply do not allow any adjustments at all.

So I suppose my criticism of Droidcam OBS is a bit harsh since every other app I tested is just as bad or even worse in this regard. I merely think that a ton of potential is being wasted due to one design decision here because the rest of the app is top-notch.

Today I restored this blog from an old backup. The entire process took about an hour with an additional hour of trying to clean up old datasets and get rid of some encoding errors that the blog has had since I last migrated things around in the early 2010s.

This demonstrates not only the usefulness of backups (do your backups!) but also illustrates the point I wanted to make for a while.

The data on my server is mine. I own it. If I feel like it, I can replace every occurance of the word “blog” with “benis”. There is no moderation team that will judge my now-benised posts to be inappropriate, racist or immoral and delete them.

I can take every last bit of my data to modify and/or move it. Something your preferred platform might not allow you to do.

Yes, I have been a terrible, terrible sloth. I neglected this blog (although not the server it is running on) and did not provide any interesting content in quite a while.

In my defense I must say that there are very few problems I need to solve these days. Long gone are the days when I pulled my hair over IR remote controls that would work with LIRC. No more stunts with automatically mirroring certain websites, filtering the local content and presenting it. Building a failsafe fileserver from scratch is no longer required.

Simply put: Things finally work.

Why would I still bother with crawling through hardware compatibility lists to find a cheap USB IR receiver on eBay when I can use my smartphone to control applications? Why mirror and process websites, when there are easier ways. Rolling your own solution gives you all the control – but also means that you are pretty much on your own. And that is fine if you have the necessary time to solve the problems you might run into.

Call it “growing up” or “becoming lazy” – but I like my solutions to be time-efficient and often pre-packaged these days. Yes, it bites me in the buttocks sometimes; Yahoo! Pipes closing put me in a rough spot for about 2 months – parts of my automation infrastructure depended on Pipes doing data transformation. I had to build my own custom solution that would replace Pipes for me. But due to the fact that I used Pipes for years and therefore knew my exact requirements helped me a lot. I knew where I could cut corners without hurting the end result, my own data transformation tool went online 2 weeks before Pipes finally shut down and has been working great ever since. Yes, I no longer run a Solaris fileserver and rely on a Synology NAS instead. And yes, I run Windows instead of Linux these days.

This does not mean that I have lost my passion for tinkering. It means I am more careful with what I spend my time on.

If you are using Unlocator, a DNS-based service to bypass region locks on popular streaming services, you might have run into some small troubles as of late. I know a few of the people I assist with their IT-troubles have.

Most prominently the digital storefront Steam presents itself in a somewhat broken fashion and Nvidia’s download sites won’t work.

Why is that? Unlocator tries to inject it’s own SSL certificate into Akamai’s connections, causing all sensible software to abandon the connection.

The only workaround currently present is to not use Unlocator. Simple as that.