Some Notes on the Machines

A new tool, very good:

http://www.drivethelife.com/

Additionals, not tested yet:

http://drivermax.en.lo4d.com/

http://driver-genius-professional.en.lo4d.com/

http://driver-fusion.en.lo4d.com/

This one appears to work rather well:

http://smadav.en.lo4d.com/

To determine the version of Internet Explorer via CMD, do this:

reg query "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer" /v "Version"

A new tool from a worthwhile source:

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

The great open-source tool Syncthing works very well for private DropBox-class capability, including optional file-multiversioning at one or more sync locations. I have some very used PC hardware which would work well enough for this, but then I was thinking, I could save the cost of a 24/7 150W light bulb at the very least, if my cute little Raspberry Pi 2 could do the job.

The end of the story is already here; it’s working beautifully. Here’s the elements I am using:

• One Raspberry Pi 2 with Raspbian installed in default fashion on its bundled microSD card, good passwords set, and fully up to date, including firmware. I have been finding considerable performance boosts with update of firmware, so I definitely recommend it.
• One USB flash drive big enough to hold your sync archive with satisfactory free space. It might work with a USB hard drive, but it didn’t work with my OEM-portablized Hitachi TravelStar, too much power demand…although I did limit the power use of the whole rig by using one 2.1A double-USB cell-phone charger for everything! :-) I’m now using a 32-gigabyte LEXAR USB flash drive, the archive is currently 17.5G.
• Wire or wireless to the Internet connection. I have not seen a major performance hit from wireless, but then again I’m using a pretty beefy wireless router and my wifi environment is not choked.
• The USB flash drive formatted BTRFS. (One does the format using mkfs.btrfs, and then sets the /etc/fstab for automount and auto-check at boot.) This is important, because one can find quite a large number of reports of USB flash drives failing when used as OS drives under ext3, ext4, and NTFS. I first set it all up using NTFS on the flash drive, and had noticed the flash drive’s LED flashing frankly all of the time, even in moments when there was no traffic according to Syncthing, and the incoming stream was forced to pause a lot. That concerned me, so I tried it in ext4, and it was just about as bad. So I did a bit of research, found the many reports of failures, found multiple flash-specific filesystems all of which admitted of various different downsides which I didn’t like very much, set it up again using BTRFS, and was really amazed. The LED went off a whole lot less, and the effective incoming bandwidth during full sync literally doubled, ~1-1.5M/s to ~3-3.8M/s depending on the moment, and no pauses visible.
• Special BTRFS attributes set up in /etc/fstab. I set these and did a reboot after the full sync was about one-third done, and was yet more amazed. Even when full sync was going on, the LED did not and does not flash more than a half-second or so every once in a long while, and incoming stream bandwidth remains very nice. I’m using ssd_spread, noatime, and space_cache. A USB stick can’t really count as an SSD because its circuitry hides a lot of things from the OS, so the attribute “ssd” does not take effect if set, but these three work just fine and should keep it running as long and reliably as possible.

Here it is on my bench at home, doing its so-quiet production work, not moved yet to its permanent location. Everything except the (temporary) screen is visible, the “power supply” is plugged into a two-prong extension cord; and those are CD blanks in the corner for a size comparison :-)

Try it, you’ll like it! :-)

More methods of the same, not tested yet:

https://www.seafile.com

Lots of devices and old PCs have trouble connecting to Server 2012, because Server 2012 uses SMB 3.0, and older devices often use SMB 1.0. There is a way:

http://xenomorph.net/windows/issues/windows-xp-cannot-connect-to-2012-r2-file-shares/

File Manager HD by Cheetah Mobile is one. Works well and fast, lots of features.

File Explorer plus its add-on, by NextApp is another. It’s definitely better for the end-user.

I just rebuilt my glibc, optimizing the build for my particular CPU. I was amazed at how much more speed it brought me on this >5-year-old laptop, 2G RAM, dual-core 2 GHz Intel. Here’s what I did. If you’re following this, bear in mind that version numbers will have to be changed as development goes on!

1. Get everything you need to build glibc. You may very well discover more packages to install if errors show up further down, depending on how you installed Debian to begin with.

apt-get build-dep glibc

2. Create a folder for your build, and get the current source.

cd ~/Downloads; mkdir glibc-recompile; cd glibc-recompile; apt-get source glibc

3. Edit a few files to set the optimization.

First change directory here: cd ~/Downloads/glibc-recompile/glibc-2.19/debian

Now edit the file named rules, and look for these two lines:

BUILD_CFLAGS = -O2 -g
HOST_CFLAGS = -pipe -O2 -g $(call xx,extra_cflags)

Change them as follows:

BUILD_CFLAGS = -O2 -march=native -mtune=native
HOST_CFLAGS = -pipe -O2 $(call xx,extra_cflags) -march=native -mtune=native

Now change to here: cd ~/Downloads/glibc-recompile/glibc-2.19/debian/sysdeps

You’ll now want to edit the file x32.mk, find this line:

i386_extra_cflags = -march=pentium4 -mtune=generic

and change it to:

i386_extra_cflags = -march=native -mtune=native

Then, if your CPU is Intel/AMD-compatible and your OS is 32-bit, you’ll want to edit i386.mk, find this:

i686_extra_cflags = -march=i686 -mtune=generic

and change it to this:

i686_extra_cflags = -march=native -mtune=native

and also find this:

xen_extra_cflags = -march=i686 -mtune=generic -mno-tls-direct-seg-refs

and change it to:

xen_extra_cflags = -march=native -mtune=native -mno-tls-direct-seg-refs

and if you’re Intel-compatible but your OS is 64-bit, edit amd64.mk, find this:

i386_extra_cflags = -march=pentium4 -mtune=generic

and change it to this:

i386_extra_cflags = -march=native -mtune=native

If you are running outside of the Intel/AMD world, you’ll want to find the correct file at this point for your CPU and make the same sort of setting, the idea is that “native” refers to whatever CPU on which the compiler finds itself running.

4. Use Debian packaging tools to set a local package version. The last command in the string below will load the appropriate file in an editor:

cd ~/Downloads/glibc-recompile/glibc-2.19/debian ; dch

At this writing the original is “2.19-13”, and dch has already added this to the top:

glibc (2.19-13.1) UNRELEASED; urgency=medium

and I changed that top line to this:

glibc (2.19-13+local-native.1) UNRELEASED; urgency=medium

and then we save and close. dch then takes care of telling the other files that this local version is legit, and renames the package directory to match, which prepares us for the next step.

5. Create a .tar.gz of the new source tree.

cd ~/Downloads/glibc-recompile ; tar czvf glibc_2.19-13+local.orig.tar.gz glibc-2.19-13+local

6. Begin the build.

cd ~/Downloads/glibc-recompile/glibc-2.19-13+local ; debuild -us -uc

At this point you may discover additional packages which are needed. Install them, and begin #6 again. Otherwise it will generate several .deb files one level up, in ~/Downloads/glibc-recompile.

7. Install the .deb files.

First traverse here:

cd ~/Downloads/glibc-recompile/

Then try to install them all:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

You may get errors related to the presence of libc6 or libc6_2.19-13+local-native.1_i386.deb. If you do, install this one individually:

sudo dpkg -i libc6_2.19-13+local-native.1_i386.deb

and then do them all again:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Then reboot, and see!

Update your firmware first to the latest, and then try this:

http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/23407/~/how-do-i-delete-snapshots-using-the-recovery-mode-on-my-readynas-os-6-storage

Here is one:

http://drp.su/