Problem

eNom really borked their datacenter move resulting in two days and counting of no DNS. I first noticed the issue Saturday (15 Jan 2022) night when my inbox remained clean for several hours, yes, I am one of those people that like to keep email organized and the inbox clean. A bit of head scratching and googling led me to a reddit post laying blame on the Enom Data Center Migration gone wrong. I registered my first domain in 2000 over a dialup modem. Over time I’ve registered several more domains with several registrars (based on regional or TLD requirements of the day). In 2006 I consolidated all my registrations with eNom, in 2011 eNom transferred my account to BulkRegister, and in 2020 BulkRegister transferred my account to Hover. So, today I am a Hover customer, and Hover is an eNom reseller, using eNom DNS services. ...

This post is about troubleshooting the sporadic ESP8266 hardware watchdog resets in my water recirculation pump controller project. The ESP8266 would randomly restart, which I can observe by monitoring the uptime reported by ESPHome to Home Assistant. It is difficult to debug because the Sonoff TH10 is in a waterproof case in my garage, making it difficult to get a USB/UART connection for debug logging. The alternative is to monitor logs over the network, and to include the debug component that will log the restart reason. But, network logging does not capture crash information, that is only logged by UART. ...

In my last test I compared Unraid SMB performance with an Ubuntu VM running on Unraid, and Ubuntu outperformed Unraid. I was wondering if the VM disk image synthetically improved performance, maybe IO caching, so this time I tested Ubuntu on the same hardware that runs Unraid. I configured the system to boot from either the Unraid USB stick, or an Ubuntu Server USB stick. In both cases the hardware was exactly the same, and the SMB share was on the same 4 x 1TB Samsung 860 Pro SSD BTRFS volume. I mounted the BTRFS volume using the same mount options that Unraid uses. The Ubuntu Samba server used default options, the only change I made was to register the share. ...

In a previous adventure I replaced an Adaptec HBA with an LSI SAS3 HBA, and the chassis drive bay LED’s stopped working. I suspect the LSI card does not play nice with the SGPIO sideband controller, and I decided to replace the chassis with one similar to my SC846 chassis, where the LSI card and drive bay LED’s do work fine. What should have been a simple replacement turned into quite a recovery operation. ...

This post started with a quick experiment, but after hardware incompatibilities forced me to swap SSD drives, and subsequently lose a data volume, it turned into a much bigger effort. My two Unraid servers have been running nonstop without any issues for many months, last I looked the uptime on v6.7.2 was around 240 days. We recently experienced an extended power failure, and I noticed 5 parity errors, on both servers, after the servers were restarted. ...

In my last two posts I described how I migrated from W2K16 and hardware RAID6 to Unraid. Now that I’ve had two Unraid servers in production for a while, I’ll describe some of the good and not so good I experienced. Running Docker on Unraid is magnitudes easier compared to getting Docker to work on Windows. Docker allowed me to move all but one of my workloads from VM’s to containers, simplifying updates, reducing the memory footprint, and improving performance. ...

In my last post I described how I converted one of my W2K16 servers to Unraid, and how I am preparing for conversion of the second server. As I’ve been copying all my data from W2K16 to Unraid, I discovered some interesting discrepancies between W2K16 SMB and Unraid SMB. I use robocopy to mirror files from one server to the other, and once the first run completes, any subsequent runs should complete without needing to copy any files again (unless they were modified). ...

Update: On 27 July 2018 eNom support notified me by email that the issue is resolved. I tested it, and all is back to normal with DNS-O-Matic. Sometime between 12 May 2018 and 24 May 2018 the eNom dynamic DNS update mechanism stopped working. I use the very convenient DNS-O-Matic dynamic DNS update service to update my OpenDNS account, and several host records at eNom, pointing them to my home IP address. ...

Not too long ago I complained about Razer’s poor UX and Support, this time it is a BSOD in one of their drivers, and forever crashing Razer Stargazer camera software. I’ve been looking for a Windows Hello capable webcam, and the Razer Stargazer, based on Intel RealSense technology, looked promising. The device is all metal and tactical looking, but the software experience is so buggy, install this, install that, then crash after crash after crash. I ended up returning it for a refund, and got a Logitech BRIO instead, the BRIO is cheaper, and works great. ...

This post is just me venting my frustration at Razer’s poor software user experience, and their shoddy support practices. I’m writing this after I just had to go and find a working mouse, so I could click a button on a dialog that had no keyboard navigation support. I’ve been using Razer keyboards and mice for some time, love them, their software not so much. I had to replace an aging ThinkPad, and the newly released Razer Blade Stealth looked like a great candidate, small and fast, reasonably priced, should be perfect, well, not so much. ...