Weeknote 1/2024: A new beginning

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Wow, that was a bump. New Year celebrations over, a day off for the public holiday, and straight back to work.

After a lot of uncertainty in December, I’ve been keen to get stuck in to something valuable, and I’m not breaking any confidentiality by saying that my focus right now is on refreshing the collateral behind Node4’s Public Cloud offerings. I need to work across the business – my Office of the CTO (OCTO) role is about strategy, innovation and offering development – but the work also needs to include specialist sales colleagues, our marketing teams, and of course the experts that actually deliver the engagements.

So that’s the day job. Alongside that, I’ve been:

  • Avoiding stating any grand new year resolutions. I’ll only break them. It was literally hours before I broke my goal of not posting on Twitter/X this year. Though I did step away from a 453-day streak on Duolingo to focus my spare time on other, hopefully less gamified, pursuits:
  • Doing far too little exercise. A recurring health condition is impacting my ability to walk, run, cycle and to get back to Caveman Conditioning. It’s getting a bit better but it may be another week before I can have my new year fitness kick-start.
  • Eating badly. Logging everything in the Zoe app is helping me to see what I should avoid (spoiler: I need to eat more plants and less sweet stuff) but my willpower is still shockingly bad. I was also alarmed to see Prof. Tim Spector launching what appeared to be an ultra-processed food (UPF) product. More on that after I’ve got to M&S and actually seen the ingredients list for the Zoe Gut Shot, but others are telling me it’s not a UPF.
  • Redesigning the disaster recovery strategy for my photos. I learned the hard way several years ago that RAID is not a backup, and nothing exists unless it’s in three places. For me that’s the original, a copy on my Synology NAS, and copy in the cloud. My cloud (Azure) backups were in a proprietary format from the Synology Hyper Backup program, so I’ve started to synchronise the native files by following a very useful article from Charbel Nemnom, MVP. Unfortunately the timestamps get re-written on synchronisation, but the metadata is still inside the files and these are the disaster copies – hopefully I’ll never need to rely on them.
  • Watching the third season of Slow Horses. No spoilers please. I still have 4 episodes to watch… but it’s great TV.
  • Watching Mr Bates vs. The Post Office. The more I learn about the Post Office Scandal, the more I’m genuinely shocked. I worked for Fujitsu (and, previously, ICL) for just over 15 years. I was nothing to do with Horizon, and knew nothing of the scandal, but it’s really made me think about the values of the company where I spent around half my career to date.
  • Spreading some of my late Father-in-law’s ashes by his tree in the Olney Community Orchard.
  • Meeting up with old friends from my “youth”, as one returns to England from his home in California, for a Christmas visit.

Other things

Other things I found noteworthy this week:

  • Which came first, the chicken or the egg scissors or the blister-pack?

Press coverage

This week, I was quoted in this article:

Coming up

This weekend will see:

  • A return to Team MK Youth Cycle Coaching. Our local cyclo-cross league is finished for the 2023/4 season so we’re switching back to road cycling as we move into the new year.
  • Some home IT projects (more on them next week).
  • General adulting and administration.

Next week, I’ll be continuing the work I mentioned at the head of this post, but also joining an online Group Coaching session from Professor John Amaechi OBE. I have no idea what to expect but I’m a huge fan of his wise commentary. I’m also listening to The Promises of Giants on Audible. (I was reading on Kindle, but switched to the audiobook.)

This week in photos

Featured image: Author’s own
(this week’s flooding of the River Great Ouse at Olney)

Weeknote 4: music; teenagers; creating a chatbot; tech, more tech and tech TV; 7 day photo challenge; and cycling (Week 46, 2017)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Another week, another weeknote…

There’s not much to say about work this week – I’ve mostly been writing documentation. I did spend a good chunk of Monday booking hotels and travel, only to find 12 days of consulting drop out of my diary again on Friday (cue hotel cancellations, etc.) but I guess that’s just life!

Family life: grime, rap and teens!

Outside work, it’s been good to be close to home and get involved in family life again.

I had the amusement of my 11 year-old and his friends rapping to their grime music on my car on the way to/from football training this week (we’re at the age where it’s “Dad, can we have my music on please?”) but there’s only so much Big Shaq I can take so I played some Eminem on the way back. It was quite endearing to hear my son say “I didn’t know you knew about Eminem!” after I dropped his mates off. I should make the most of these moments as the adulation is dropping off now he approaches his teens!

Talking of teens, my eldest turned 13 this week, which was a big day in the Wilson household:

 

I’m not sure how this little fella grew into this strong chap (or where the time in between has gone) but we introduced him to the Harry Enfield “Kevin the teenager” videos a few months ago. I thought they were funny when I was younger but couldn’t believe how accurate they are now I’m a parent. Our boys clearly understood the message too and looked a bit sheepish!

Tech

I did play with some tech this week – and I managed to create my very own chatbot without writing any code:

Virtual Mark (MarkBot1) uses the Microsoft QnA Maker and runs in Microsoft Azure. The process is described in James Marshall’s blog post and it’s very straightforward. I’m using Azure Functions and so far this serverless solution has cost me absolutely nothing to run!

It’s also interesting reading some of the queries that the bot has been asked, which have led to me extending its knowledge base a few times now. A question and answer chatbot is probably more suited to a set of tightly bounded questions on a topic (the things people can ask about me is pretty broad) but it’s a nice demo…

I also upgraded my work PC to the latest Windows 10 and Office builds (1709 and 1710 respectively), which gave me the ability to use a digital pen as a presentation clicker, which is nice, in a geek-novelty kind of way:

Tech TV

I have an Amazon Prime membership, which includes access to Amazon Prime Instant Video – including several TV shows that would otherwise only be available in the US. One I enjoy is Mr Robot – which although completely weird at times is also strangely addictive – and this week’s episode was particularly good (scoring 9.9 on IMDB). Whilst I was waiting for the next episode to come around, I found that I’d missed a whole season of Halt and Catch Fire too (I binge-watched the first three after they were recommended to me by Howard van Rooijen/@HowardvRooijen). Series 4 is the final one and that’s what presently keeping me from my sleep… but it’s really good!

I don’t have Netflix, but Silicon Cowboys has been recommended to me by Derek Goodridge (@workerthread). Just like the first series of Halt and Catch Fire, it’s the story of the original IBM PC clone manufacturers – Compaq – but in documentary format, rather than as a drama series.

iPhone images

Regular readers may recall that a few weeks ago I found myself needing to buy a new iPhone after I fell into the sea with my iPhone in my pocket, twisting my ankle in the process…

People have been telling me for ages that “the latest iPhone has a great camera” and, in daylight, I’m really impressed by the clarity and also the bokeh effect. It’s still a mobile phone camera with a tiny sensor though and that means it’s still really poor at night. If a full-frame DSLR struggles at times, an iPhone will be challenged I guess – but I’m still finding that I’m inspired to use the camera more.

7 Days 7 Photos

Last week, I mentioned the 7 days, 7 photos challenge. I’ve completed mine now and they are supposed to be without explanation but, now I have a set of 7 photos, I thought I would explain what and why I used these ones. I get the feeling that some people are just posting 7 pictures, one a day, but these really do relate to what I was doing each day – and I tried to nominate people for the challenge each day based on their relevance to the subject…

Day 1

7 Days 7 Photos Day 1

I spotted this pub as I walked to Farringdon station. I wondered if “the clerk and well” was the origin of the name for “Clerkenwell” and it turns out that it is. Anyway, I liked the view of the traditional London pub (I was on my way home from another one!) and challenged my brother, who’s a publican…

Day 2

7 Days 7 Photos Day 2

I liked the form in this photograph of my son’s CX bike on the roof of my car. It didn’t look so clean when we got back from cyclocross training though! I challenged my friend Andy, whose 40th birthday was the reason for my ride from London to Paris a few years ago…

Day 3

7 Days 7 Photos Day 3

Not technically a single photo – lets’ call it a triptych, I used the Diptic app (as recommended by Ben Seymour/@bseymour) to create this collage. I felt it was a little too personal to nominate my friend Kieran, whose medals are in the lower left image, so I nominated my friend James, who was leading the Scouts in our local remembrance day parade.

Day 4

7 Days 7 Photos Day 4

I found some failed backups on my Synology NAS this week. For some reason, Hyper Backup complained it didn’t have enough storage (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Azure that ran out of space!) so I ran several backups, each one adding another folder until I had all of my new photos in the backup set. I felt the need to challenge a friend who works in IT – so I challenged my friend Stuart.

Day 5

7 Days 7 Photos Day 5

My son was cake-baking, for Children in Need, I think – or maybe it was my other son, baking his birthday cake. I can’t really remember. I challenged a friend who runs a local cafe and regularly bakes muffins…

Day 6

7 Days 7 Photos Day 6

Self-explanatory. My son’s own creation for his birthday. I challenged my wife for this one.

Day 7

7 Days 7 Photos Day 7

The last image is following an evening helping out at Scouts. Images of attempts to purify water through distillation were not that great, so I took a picture of the Scout Badge, and nominated my friend Phil, who’s another one of the local Scout leaders.

(All seven of these pictures were taken on an iPhone 8 Plus using the native camera app, then edited in Snapseed and uploaded to Flickr)

Other stuff

I like this:

And I remember shelves of tapes like these (though mine were all very neatly written, or computer-generated, even back in the 1980s):

On the topic of music, look up Master Boot Record on Spotify:

And this “Soundtrack for Coding” is pretty good for writing documentation too…

I added second-factor authentication to my WordPress blog this week. I couldn’t find anything that uses the Microsoft Authenticator, but this 2FA WordPress plugin from miniOrange uses Google Authenticator and was very easy to set up.

Some UK libraries have started loaning BBC Microbits but unfortunately not yet in my manor:

Being at home all week meant I went to see my GP about my twisted ankle (from the falling-into-the-sea incident). One referral later and I was able to see a physio… who’s already working wonders on helping to repair my damaged ligaments. And he says I can ride my bike too… so I’ll be back on Zwift even if cyclocross racing is out for the rest of the season.

Cycling

On the subject of Zwift, they announced a price rise this week. I understand that these things happen but it’s gone up 50% in the US (and slightly more than that here in the UK). All that really does is drive me to use Zwift in the winter and to cancel my membership in the summer. A more reasonable monthly fee might make me more inclined to sign up for 12 months at a time and create a recurring revenue for Zwift. Very strange business model, IMHO.

I particularly liked the last line of this article:

“Five minutes after the race
That was sooo fun! When can I do it again?!”

I may not have been riding cyclocross this weekend, but my son was, and Sunday was the popular Central Cyclocross League race at RAF Halton. With mud, sand, gravel and steep banks, long woodland sections and more, it looked epic. Maybe I’ll get to ride next year!

I did get to play with one of the RAF’s cranes (attached to a flatbed truck) though – amazing how much control there is – and had a go on the road safety rig too.

And of course, what else to eat at a cyclocross event but Belgian fries, mayo and waffles!

Finally, my friends at Kids Racing (@kidsracing) have some new kit in. Check out the video they filmed at the MK Bowl a couple of weeks back – and if you have kids in need of new cycling kit, maybe head over to HUP CC.

Wrap-up

That’s it for this week. Next week I have a bit more variation in my work (including another Microsoft event – Azure Ready in the UK) and I’m hoping to actually get some blog posts written… see you on the other side!

Short takes: SSH, custom ports, root and Synology NASs

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This blog has been much maligned of late… I’d like to get more time to write and I have literally hundreds of part-written posts, some of which are now just a collection of links for me to unpick…

In the meantime, a couple of snippets that may be useless, or may help someone one day…

Using SSH with a custom port number

My Synology NAS complains about poor security if I leave SSH enabled on port 22. It’s fine if I change it to another port though (security by obscurity!). Connecting then needs a bit more work as it’s ssh user@ipaddress -p portnumber (found via the askubuntu forums)

Logging on to a Synology NAS from SSH as root

On a related topic, I recently needed to SSH to my NAS as root (not admin). ssh root@ipaddress -p portnumber wasn’t authenticating correctly and then I found Synology’s advice on how to login to DSM with root permission via SSH/Telnet. It seems I have to first log on as admin, then sudo -i to elevate to root.

Synology Hyper Backup and DSM update failures

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I have a Synology DS916+ NAS and, for the 9 months or so, I’ve been using it to back up my photos to Microsoft Azure. I’ve realised that they are being backed up in a format that’s unique to Synology’s Hyper Backup program, so I should probably see if there is an alternative that backs up the files in their native format but, more worryingly, this afternoon I noticed that backups had been failing for a few days. The logs weren’t much help (no detailed information) and a search on the ‘net didn’t turn much up either. For reference, this was the (very high level) information in the logs when viewed in the Hyper Backup GUI:

Information 2017/07/08 03:00:02 SYSTEM [Azure Blob] [Backup Photos to Microsoft Azure] Backup task started.
Error 2017/07/08 03:00:33 SYSTEM [Azure Blob] [Backup Photos to Microsoft Azure] Exception occured while backing up data.
Error 2017/07/08 03:00:36 SYSTEM [Azure Blob] [Backup Photos to Microsoft Azure] Failed to backup data.
Error 2017/07/08 03:00:36 SYSTEM [Azure Blob] [Backup Photos to Microsoft Azure] Failed to run backup task.

(Since then, I’ve found how to view detailed backup logs on a Synology NAS, thanks to a blog post by Jonathan Mumm, though in this case, the logs didn’t shine much of a light on the problem for me.)

I wondered if there were any DSM updates available that might fix things but, when I checked for updates, I got a message to say “Insufficient capacity for update. The system partition requires at least 400MB”. Googling suggested lots of manual file deletion and I was sure this was just a buildup of temp files (maybe to do with the failed backup), so I decided to reboot. After all, what do you do when a computer isn’t working as expected? Turn it off and on again!

After rebooting, attempts to update no longer produced an error (simply confirming that I’m up-to-date with DSM 6.1.2-15132) and the backup is now running nicely (it will take a few hours to complete as I added a few months’ worth of iPhone photos to the NAS earlier in the week, around about the time the backups started failing…)

Using rsync to keep folders in sync on a Synology Diskstation NAS

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Now I have backups working between my Synology Diskstation NAS and a storage account in Microsoft Azure (with over half a TB of photos so far backed up in the cloud), the next stage is to consolidate some more images into the folder that the backup works from.

I don’t want to remove them from their source (which in this case is the copy of my OneDrive data on my home drive) but I do want to archive all of the iPhone images I have there to the master photos folder so they are included in the backup.

Reading around the Synology forums suggests that this is not as straightforward as one might think. It appears there’s no easy way to synchronise two folders on the same NAS within the DSM software; but then I stumbled across Zarino Zappia (@zarino)’s post about a Synology-flavoured rsync backup script.

By following Zarino’s advice and using ssh to connect to the box as admin, I was able to achieve what I wanted with the following command:

rsync --itemize-changes --archive --progress --verbose --inplace --exclude '*@SynoResource' --exclude '@eaDir' --exclude '*.vsmeta' --exclude '.DS_Store' --exclude 'Thumbs.db' /volume1/homes/mark/OneDrive/iPhone\ Photos/ /volume1/photos/Digital\ Photos\ \(Master\)/Mark\'s\ iPhone/

(BTW, right click is the way to paste text to the command line in PuTTY!)

Some people on the Synology forums had suggested synchronising via another computer on the network would be fast! That sounds strange to me – logically a copy will always be faster on a single device with no network in between. For reference, it took about 20 minutes to rsync 32GB of images/videos on my on my DS916+.

Incidentally, the Error 23 in the screen shots was actually a typo in my command (missing space before one of the –exclude options). I re-ran with –dry-run to see which files were not transferred…

The next step will be to script this and get it running as a scheduled task but that can wait for another day…

My first few weeks with a Synology Diskstation NAS

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Earlier this summer, I bought myself a new NAS. I’d lost faith in my old Netgear ReadyNAS devices a while ago, after a failure took out both halves of a RAID 1 mirror and I lost all the data on one of them. That actually taught me two important lessons:

  1. Data doesn’t exist unless it’s backed up in at least two places.
  2. RAID 1 is not suitable for fault-tolerant backups.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, my new model is to get all of the data into one place, then sync/archive as appropriate to the cloud. Anything on any other PCs, external disks, etc. should be considered transient.

For the device itself, it seems that there are only really two vendors to consider – QNAP or Synology (maybe a Drobo). I chose Synology – and elected to go with a 4-bay model, picking up a Synology Diskstation DS916+ (8GB) and kitting it out with 4 Hitachi (HGST) Deskstar NAS drives.

Unfortunately, I had a little hiccup in that I’d ordered the device pre-configured. The weight of the disks was clearly too much for the plastic drive carriers to cope with but, once again, span.com sorted things out for me and I soon had a replacement in my possession.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been building up what I’m doing with the Diskstation: providing home drives for the family; syncing all of my cloud storage; acting as a VPN endpoint; providing DHCP and DNS services; running anti-virus checks; and backing up key files to Microsoft Azure.

This last workload is worthy of discussion, as it took me a couple of weeks to push my data to the cloud. Setup was fairly straightforward, following Paris Polyzos (@ppolyzos)’s advice to backup Synology NAS data in Microsoft Azure Cool Storage but the volume of data and the network it had to traverse was more problematic.

Initially I had issues with timeouts due to a TP-Link HomeplugAV (powerline Ethernet) device between the ISP router and the DNS server that kept failing. I worked around that by moving DNS onto the NAS, and physically locating the NAS next to the router (bypassing the problematic section of network). Then it was just a case of waiting for my abysmal home Internet connection to cope with multi-GB upstream transfers…

I have no doubts that this NAS, albeit over-specified for a family (because I wanted an Intel-based model), is a great device but I did need to work around some issues with vibration noise. It’s also slightly frustrating that there is no integration between the DHCP and DNS services (I’ve been spoiled working with Windows Server…), the Security Advisor reports are a bit dramatic, and some of the Linux commands are missing – but I really haven’t found anything yet that’s a show-stopper.

Now I need to get back to consolidating data onto the device, and moving more of it into the cloud…

Preventing vibration noise on a Synology NAS

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

My Synology Diskstation NAS (DS916+) has been a great purchase but I have had some issues with noise from vibration. Over a course of a few weeks, complaints from family members meant that I had to move the NAS from my desk, onto the floor, then into the garage (before I brought it into the kitchen to be next to the Internet connection – but that’s another story). You should be able to hear the noise in the video below (though it seems much louder in real life!):

As can be heard, the vibration noise reduces when I put pressure on the chassis. It seems that it’s actually caused by the screw-less drive carriers that Synology use on their NASs.

Thanks to advice from Chipware on Reddit, I was able to add some sticky-backed Velcro (just the fluffy side) between the disk carrier and the disk, and on the outside of the disk carriers. They now better fit the NAS and, crucially, the Velcro serves as a shock absorber, preventing any more vibrations…

And, at just £2 for a metre of sticky-backed Velcro (which I only used a few centimetres of), it was a pretty inexpensive fix.

Chipware says in his post that:

“I definitely think the 4 Velcro pieces connecting the sled to the cage solved the problem. The pieces between drive and sled connection provides negligible dampening.”

I initially only put 4 pieces on the outside of the carrier (2 of them can be seen in the picture) but my experience was that adding 2 more pieces on the disk itself (underneath the carrier) also helped. Of course, your mileage my vary (and any changes you make are at your own risk – I’m not responsible for any problems it may cause).

After making these modifications there’s no more noise, just a relatively quiet fan noise (as to be expected) and the NAS is back on my desk!