scott

The Story of Plex Back on my DiskStation

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My Intel NUC i5 inexplicably died in late February 2022. I am not sure if it was the main board or the power supply. I got a new power supply on eBay and that did not fix the issue so it was an internal component. I was not sure if the computer is fried or it’s an easy fix. So after procrastinating a bunch I just gave up on it. It was likely a lot of effort to fix or just toast anyway.

Until I can either replace or fix the NUC I needed somewhere to run my Plex Media Server. As luck would have it I already had an instance of Plex running on a Raspberry Pi 4. It couldn’t transcode but it worked ok. It was not a real replacement for the NUC.

Instead I installed Plex (again) on my Synology Diskstation. I hadn’t run Plex on my Diskstation in years. The main reason was both my backup software Resilio & Plex running on my Synologu DS422+ at the same time would crash it with out of memory errors. After some testing I was not able to replicate the failed state with both software now. I am not sure what I am doing differently or if one or both apps improved memory management. I was able to get them to coexist. For now that means my Plex lived on my diskstation.

Then in October my Synology Diskstation DS412+ had a power failure. The array was degraded. The Diskstation was over 10 years old by then. I made the decision to upgrade to a new Diskstation DS920+. I also upgraded drives to give myself approximately 35tb vs the 10 I had previously. Luckily the array was degraded on the DS412+ however not totally destroyed. I was able to mount 3 of the 4 original drives in the new Diskstation and then over a few weeks one by one replace and expand the array with the new bigger drives.

I have been running on the new Diskstation for a few months now with no issue. The Dikstation with all the apps I use only averages 25% CPU, and with 8 gig RAM only on average is using about 1/3 of that. I can go bigger on the RAM if I want to so I have some room to grow. The hardware transcoding on the DS920+ is why I chose that NAS over others. I have not been disappointed so far. The only annoyance was less than a week after I bought the DS920+ the DS923+ came out. I had waited so long to buy a new one in the first place hoping the new model would come out only to finally get one after giving up on the 22 models then have a new one come out straight away. A small consolation is the reviews of the new device are mixed so I may have been lucky to get the old one.

5 Years and a Day

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Luggage Cart Full of Luggage

Yesterday I forgot to write. 5 years and a day ago we arrived in the UK. We did a day flight so we stayed in a hotel and aimed to start settling in.

5 years ago today we collected the keys to the house we were letting. Then went to IKEA for beds and other essentials since our container would take another month and 2 days to arrive.

As i write this about the same time 5 years ago we were battling our boiler since it wasn’t actually heating. Luckily we had a hotel room for an extra night so fled the cold back there to fix the boiler the next day.

Today was a bit easier than 5 years ago. I took T to the cinema while A went to a birthday party. It was a nice holiday day off.

Hard to believe that was a half a decade ago. I would write more however I need to go study for my life in the UK test!

Goodbye Twitter and More…

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It would be easy for me to say I’m leaving Twitter because of the new owner. The reality is that is just background noise and just nonsensical to me. I have talked about leaving social media for a while. I’ve deleted my Facebook account and recreated it at least once. A few years ago I wrote how I didn’t really post on Twitter. I previously used Twitter to get real time information during a few weather related incidents. And also during a bomb scare in Times Square. That at the time had some value to me and was why partly why I kept it. The other reason i kept Twitter around was I would automatically send blog post links to Twitter when I posted on WordPress. The intention was to radiate to friends when i posted.

In recent years I have not used Twitter for any real time searches for anything. I could do searches like that without an account anyway. I simply get no value out of the service. The shenanigans going with the platform now might have reminded me of that fact.

The final trigger was that when I looked at the analytics on my blog for all the referrals I get to my blog from Twitter I noticed that this year I got a whopping 13. That number throws out any notion that keeping Twitter is helping to direct friends and family to my blog posts. With that revelation on top of generally not getting any joy or value out of the service it made no sense to keep it.

It is not just Twitter that i have closed accounts for. I previously wrote about using Redding for several sub reddits that were useful to me. Compared to Twitter I did find value in Reddit. Then I read you could run or use a front end to Reddit that does not require you to logon to their website. That way i can read (its all i do) sub-reddits without an account anonymously. Having an account was just a way for Reddit to collect data on me. Now i use my own URL to query the groups i want to search Reddit with and the site has no analytics on me.

The same thing I do with Reddit i do a similar thing with YouTube. No Google account tracking for me thank you.

Both the Reddit & YouTube front ends i use are my own instances i have on a VPS. I have a new one for Twitter also however i do not know if i will use it as much as i do with the Reddit and YouTube ones.

Public Service Announcement

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What I have to say is not new. I learned it from my dad. He was a strong believer in clarifying this misconception. It came up recently when the girls, my mom and I were at a chocolate factory tour in Germany on half term Break.

This is very important so i will only go over it once. White Chocolate is not Chocolate.

Enjoy your holidays…

6,000 Days

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A totally random useless yet nostalgic data point for today. It has been 6,000 days since I started at Thomson Reuters. I thought the nice round number was cool.

I would never have guessed were that journey would take me, yet here i am a divestiture, and acquisition later in another continent.

Photo taken outside 3 Times Square after i accepted the offer and before i started.

USA / Iran vs England / Wales

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My kids may love living in England. However they may not yet have fully native however. This is based on their request to watch the USA vs Iran World Cup match instead of England vs Wales.

Of course after the USA’s first goal the girls did have me switch to the England game. That and we are watching football so their is that.

A New Role at Work

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I can finally say that I have started a new role today at work. Saying I have moved roles isn’t new.  I have done so on average about every 1 to 2 years over the past 14 years at Thomson Reuters / Refinitiv / LSEG. This change feels different. Since as far back as 2018 it became clear to me that I wanted to do more in the Security area of Technology vs the Operational area that had been working in. Since then I have tried to spend as much time as I could personally and professionally in the security area with my main role still being operationally focused.

In 2020 right before COVID-19 hit I applied for a role in a Security Architecture group. The timing was not good due to the pandemic. At the time i was a bit disappointed however it worked out in the long run. A few months later another role presented itself that was still in Operations (Reliability Engineering). It was however a good career progression for me. I wouldn’t have thought to go out for it until prompted.  Advise from that is listen to people you trust.

Flashing forward to this year I was interested in a role that came up. I was talking to my previous manager about it. She was very encouraging and gave me some advise i did not initially act on. A few months later I approached someone doing a similar role I was interested in. I was looking for advise on what I could do to beef up my skills so I could apply for the role. The response I got was I should just apply. So I did.

I got the offer in late July.  I have been transitioning with ever increasing amounts of time in the new role since August.  Today is the first day I am full time in the new role.  It is a bit anticlimactic since i have been spending most of my time in the role for most of October.

What is funny to me is the role is very different in many ways however at the core is still the concepts of DEV SEC OPS. It is just approaching the problems from a different angle. That is overly simplifying things a bit  How i go about my work is vastly different now.  There is also so much to learn however that is the fun part.

Now I need to start explaining to people what a BISO is and stop explaining what Reliability Engineering is. I do have some confidence now that my wife will stop telling people (very incorrectly) that I am a project manager.

The Story of The New New New Web Hosting Provider

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I have had numerous hosting providers in the past 25 years. Do I date myself by saying that? It is the truth I guess. I have hosted a website in one form or another for easily over 20 years. Trying to think of them I cannot recall all the providers I have used. I have had full service web providers. I have hosted my own. Way back when I first started out I even used free sites like Geocities or hosting via my AOL account. Yes I had one of those. I have had dedicated service providers for just mail and blog. And probably for a while I might have done nothing other than simply used Gmail. Over two years ago I moved to a provider siteground.co.uk. They hosted my blog, some email domains of mine that are not on Protonmail and any odd and end webiste I put up. For what they offer it is probably overkill for me. I signed up because the previous provider I had Hostpoint.sh contract was up. Hostpoint was on the expensive side.  They were a great provider for what they offered. The cost benefit for me did not make it economically sensible to continue to use them.  Siteground had a really good deal so i signed up for a 3 year contract with them. For me three years is like a lifetime. I never used to like 1 to 2 year mobile phone contracts. The deal was too good to pass up so I signed for that term.

Now as I write this I have less than 6 months on my site ground contract I looked at how much the renewal cost will be for my hosting. Without the deal the prices it is about triple what I was spending. I have had zero problems with Siteground. Like Hostpoint they have been a fantastic hosting provider. My challenge is for what I use them for the price they’re charging just seems ridiculous. I could host a site myself at home if I wanted to sort out mail relaying. I do not want to so I started looking for alternative providers. Oddly most hosting providers are not very cheap.  yeah $5-$15 (£3-£12) or so sounds inexpensive however it adds up over the year. Most of the good ones are on the higher end of that range.

Giving up on the relitivly expensive consumer proivders I ended up looking at lowednbox.com for deals for a VPS.  If you do not know a VPS is. a Virtual Private Server. So basically a virtual machines at a hosting provider. A friend showed me the lowendbox site ages ago and i really didn’t bother looking into a VPS.  I was doing too much with my Raspberry Pi’s so did not want to pay for any remote systems.  Now however a cheap (£1-£3) a month VPS (Virtual Private Server) might just do it for me.  Most of what is offered at the £1 range may not be enough RAM for my needs however for slightly more or basically £15-£23 a year i can get a pretty decent virtual server that i could replicate most of what i get from a provider. In my search I even found a provider that does shared hosting (what most people get as webhosting) for $1.50 a month.

I wasn’t sure what i wanted so i picked up two seperate deals (3 if you could a VPS i got for a VPN project that i may write about another time) from lowendbox.com.  I got the cheap $1.5 a month shared hosting as well as a VPS for a year for £22.  Even with both providers I am paying 25% of what i would have paid if i renewed siteground.

After a bunch of trial and error with the cheap shared hosting provider and the VPS I settled on the VPS. While I was figuring out what to do and realised the $1.50 a month basic provider didn’t seem to be working out I approached the situation a bit differently. My VPS can support my website pretty easily. Even if there is a reliability issue the website doesn’t need to be up 99.99% of the time like email kinda needs to be. That meant I could decouple my mail hosting from my website if I could do it cheaply enough. I went about trying to find an email only hosting provider. The problem was just like with regular hosting everyone offered really cheap introductory rates and then the price was much higher. With email only hosting providers it was kind of funny since the price they were offering I could buy a cheap complete hosting package for the same amount of money. I then continue to look for relatively easy to maintain out of the box email applications so I could possibly host a dedicated email VPS. That was proving problematic.

In my research around hosting my own mail on a dedicated VPS I stumbled across someone reviewing a relatively inexpensive email hosting provider. Their annual plans that offered more than what I needed were pretty cheap. What was even more interesting was the fact that they offered a lifetime plan that was only slightly more limited than the annual offering I was looking at. That lifetime plan options was also more than enough for my needs. It was approximately three years worth of hosting upfront to get the lifetime plan however the company seemed to be around for a while and pretty stable. I assume that I could at least get a return on my investment in the first three years. If I am lucky I won’t have to worry about paying for mail hosting for a while beyond that. The email provider was MXRoute.

I set up a few of the email domains that are use already and the system has been pretty stable. The final cut over was moving the mail domain my mum uses and that I sometimes use. The move was pretty easy. The only challenge was setting up mum up while she is in the US and I am in the UK. The fix was getting her to use GMAIL. She had a GMAIL account she previously used already. I just directed her GMAIL account to pull from her old hosting provider I had. I then switched her over to gmail in two FaceTime sessions with her. Then once GMAIL was working I simply changed the POP account settings in GMAIL web for her and migrated the MX records of the domain. Overall there was not may issues.

With mail sorted I went back to the VPS I setup and got my blog setup. I decided to use Yunohost for the VPS. it is an app that sits on top of Debian that lets me administer the server and install other apps pretty easy. it had a one click install for WordPress (what I use for the blog) as well as many other applications. After playing around with the setup for a while I decided to move the blog over and hope for the best. I found a plugin that pretty easily migrated the blog from one instance of WordPress to another. I then changed my DNS and everything moved over pretty well. I am finishing writing this in on 6-April, exactly one month from when I moved over to my VPS. So far things are working fine. Only thing different for me and the old provider so far is that I need to remember to monthly take a backup of the site in case I break something.

Overall my VPS is costing me £24 a year. If I kept site ground that price would not cover 2 months on the regular priced plan I would have to move to when my contract runs out. Now lets hope I do not mess up my setup since I only have myself and friends to fix it vs a provider!

Editing note I wrote this in Feb 2021 and agave been slow to post. Funny enough even though I change my tech setup a lot this post is still accurate a year and a half later.