#modern computing

In 2010 I bought my first wireless mouse, the Logitech LX8 Cordless. It was perhaps not the best, but it was a solid, weighty mouse that lasted well over ten years before it started showing any issues. When it finally wore out I was happy to see what looked to be a newer version of the same, the Logitech M510.

It was not the same. It was the same overall size, shape, and layout, but rather than being any kind of an improvement, it was just cheaper all around.

In a matter of months, the left mouse button switch had already worn out. So I swapped the left & right switches, and ordered some new ones from Mouser.

Well that second switch wore out and the first had gotten significantly worse, so it was time to install those replacements.

For those moments when "that" is downloading/compiling/searching/installing and it takes so long for no apparent reason and suicide crosses your mind xD

This song goes so well with it From American electronic musician Ramona Andra Xavier/Vektroid/Macintosh Plus or many other names:  Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing or  リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュ

As I've mentioned before, I run a Proxmox VM server at home. It's a fun insanely-overpowered bit of hardware I've cobbled together over the years from what I had on hand or could get for as close to nothing as I could.

One foreseeable problem with the setup is I initially set it up with cheap consumer SSDs for boot drives. Proxmox is very heavy-handed with SSDs and I've been watching the wearout on one of the drives steadily tick higher.

Well the day finally came. I woke up to an email from the server informing me of a SMART error on one disk: wearout had hit 101%. Definitely time for replacement before things go south.

Luckily I had been procrastinating was prepared for this event and had new SSDs on-hand to swap in.

Headlines everywhere on Friday, the 19th of July, 2024 were about the massive computer outages caused by a faulty update to the CrowdStrike antivirus software. It seems some config file choked up a kernel module causing Windows machines to fail with the infamous Blue Screen of Death.

I recently started a new job and was perhaps a little smug in the fact that in my new job I am no longer responsible for hundreds of endpoints running CrowdStrike.

Karma's a bitch though.

I shut down my home PC Friday night to install a memory upgrade and after powering it back on I was met with the very same Blue Screen of Death.

"A critical process died" it told me, with no information about what said process actually was.

And no log files.

And no dump files.

System Restore failed. sfc /scannow failed. dism /cleanup-image failed. Everything I could find failed. I couldn't even just reinstall Windows over the existing installation because apparently that requires being already booted into the OS that currently isn't running.

The log files from dism led me to believe the problem might be related to registry corruption, but my attempts at replacing system registry files with clean ones from an install wim were not successful.

I was grasping at straws. Starting from scratch with a clean install is daunting and would have set me back weeks. I was contemplating pulling out an old SSD and just running with Linux Mint for a while.

Through desperation, I downloaded Hiren's BootCD PE so I could poke around a little more. None of the tools included there were able to resolve the issue either, but just having access to a standard Explorer shell and a web browser helped.

Finally I came across ShadowCopyView, a program that can explore the System Restore images that Windows (can) take regularly. In one last desperate effort, I moved out all of the system registry files from C:\Windows\System32\config and used ShadowCopyView to replace them with copies from an automatic restore point the previous Monday.

That actually did the trick. I was able to reboot into my primary Windows partition and sign in like normal.

I have no idea what may have been lost in a few days of registry updates, and I have no idea what may have caused the problem to begin with. But I am happy I was able to find something in the end that would get me back into my system without having to reinstall everything from scratch.

... Although maybe I should anyway.

And should anyone encounter something similar in the future, these were the kind of errors I was seeing that a Google search wasn't really coming up with anything useful:

dism.log: failed to open registry root

dism.log: failed to query for path to user profiles directory

dism.log: failed to load the default user profile registry hive

dism.log: failed to load offline store from boot directory

srttrail.txt: pending package install

I have a couple servers at home — one running Proxmox VE and one running Proxmox Backup. I use the VM server when I need to spin up a development environment, for running the odd game server, serving files locally, running Home Assistant, etc. I also like to donate spare cycles to Folding@Home. The backup server of course is in case I do something stupid on the VM server.

There's just one problem with that. My second-hand 8-year-old dual-Xeon server runs hot.

It was too much to keep running in my home office. Between the two servers, my desktop, and my work laptop, I was regularly seeing ambient temperatures around 26°C. It was just too warm for comfort.

Last summer I moved my network gear and the two servers into the front coat closet. This was great for me working in my home office, but not so great for my servers. Despite adding a passthrough vent to the closet door and a vent fan to the ceiling, the closet was still consistently in the 26°-30°C range.

The ideal solution would probably be to use an enclosed server rack and run an exhaust vent up from the top. Unfortunately, rack-mount server cases are expensive, enclosed racks are very expensive, and my closet is too small for that anyway.

So I hacked together a solution.

I built a frame out of some cheap 1x2 lumber and wrapped a piece of thin sheet steel around the sides to make a crude plenum. On top, I added a 10x6 register box with a semirigid vent hose coming out of it. This gives me a guide for drawing air out of the servers and guiding it up to the vent fan in the ceiling.

To help things along, I added a 120mm fan inside the register box. But not some whisper-quiet Noctua. This is (if the Amazon listing is to be believed) a 5000 RPM, 210 CFM monster of a fan. It's loud, but moves a lot of air.

Too loud in fact. Its droning could not be silenced by any mere closet door. I had to add a PWM fan speed controller to calm it down. It's a cheap unit from Amazon, but it came with a temperature probe and it has a configurable operating range.

The result? Where previously the entire closet was consistently above 26°C, now it's staying around 23°. There is a difference of 5°C between ambient in the closet and the air inside the exhaust duct, so it is doing its job of redirecting the hot air from the servers.

Making progress.

To do list:

2x Slim fans at the top, to clear RAM.

NVMe SSD

Graphics card