Categories
Computers

An Open-Heart Motherboard Surgery

The X201 completely opened up

My personal laptop, this very day, is a Lenovo (Thinkpad) X201 from 2011. That’s more than 11 years of service, and still pretty well holding up (in no small part thanks to Archlinux and Xfce). Nonetheless a few weeks ago, it just decided after a very “helpful” spark when plugged in, that it won’t turn on nor charge 🙀… After reading a bit and experimenting with the charger, the battery, &c, the probable verdict that “it needs a motherboard replacement”. I did start to consider, whether to give it piece and just wholesale replace it with a new machine, but since I’ve already taken it apart a few times, I thought that self-service might just give it a bit longer lease on life.

First time ordering from AliExpress, I actually found a bunch of people still selling the board, and at ~80USD it doesn’t even break the bank (even if it wouldn’t work, or wouldn’t work for long). Thus ordered one with the right CPU that I vaguely remembered (it’s soldered on, so couldn’t be replaced), and waited. The predicted shipping time was something like 40-70 days, but actually it turns out things can arrive in less than 14, if the delivery company sets its mind to it…

A new-old motherboard for the Lenovo X201

Now just had to get my trusty little precision screw set and start working on it (like a few times before, but hopefully with better success).

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Categories
Programming

100 Days to Offload WordPress Plugin

Hundred Days to Offload code view
VSCode view of the Hundred Days to Offload Wordpress Plugin

In the course of pushing myself to write more on this blog, I’ve come across the #100DaysToOffload project. It’s super simple: write a 100 blogposts in a year in your personal blog to unlock the achievement. It seems like gamification done to the right level, as it’s not to strenuous (“write every day” would likely fail before lift-off), and not too lax (100 blogpost are still quite a stretch to go!). Thus it looked like the right too to trick myself into doing the thing I already wanted.

On the other hand, I’m one for meta-games, especially when I have doubts whether I stand a chance in the game itself, thus came the idea of do something around 100DaysToOffload that might also result in a blogpost. Hence came the “Hundred Days to Offload” WordPress Plugin idea: get a bit of coding in, make something useful to see if the game has been “won”, an also get one (or more) write-ups out of it.

Spoiler alert: it’s working now, very barebones, but to the point… that there’s a long way to go.

Screenshot of the Hundred Days to Offload plugin in the WordPress admin interface.
How the Hundred Days to Offload plugin looks in practice (as of now).

In the process, that took a couple of days over the weekend, I’ve revisited PHP, that I used to “play” with for projects before, though haven’t done anything serious, nor made it part of my Language of the Month series, so far. It was still quite interesting to revisit with more mature eyes of e.g. how good projects look like in the Python ecosystem (where I spend most of my time), and whether lessons learned there are applicable here.

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Categories
Programming

Creating a Prometheus metrics exporter for a 4G router

Grafana view of some of the reception metrics
Grafana view of some of the reception metrics

Recently I begun fully remote working from home, with the main network connectivity provided by a 4G mobile router. Very soon I experienced patchy connectivity, not the greatest thing when you are on video calls for half of each day. What does one do then (if not just straight replacing the whole setup with a wired ISP, if possible), other than monitor what’s going on and try to debug the issues?

The router I have is a less-common variety, an Alcatel Linkhub HH441 (can’t even properly link to on the manufacturer’s site, just on online retail stores). At least as it should, it does have a web front-end, that one can poke around in, and gather metrics from – of course in an automatic way.

The Alcatel HH41 LinkHub router that I had at hand to use

Looking at the router’s web interface, and checking the network activity through the browsers’ network monitor (Firefox, Chrome), the frontend’s API calls showed up, so I could collect a few that requested different things like radio receiving metrics, bandwidth usage, uptime, and so on… From here we are off to the races setting up our monitoring infrastructure, along these pretty standard lines:

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Categories
Computers

ARM images to help the Archive Team

New York Public Library

Two weeks ago I came across a thread on Hacker News, linking to an announcement of the shutdown of Yahoo! Answers by early May. One of the early comments pointed people to the Archive Team and their project to archive Yahoo Answers before that 4th May deadline. It looked interesting and I gave their recommended tool, the Archive Team Warrior a spin. It runs in VirtualBox, super easy to set up, lightweight, and all around good. Nevertheless after one night keeping my laptop running and archiving things I was wondering if there was a less wasteful way of doing the archiving. In short order I came across the team’s notes on how to run the archiver as Docker containers. That’s more like it: I have some Raspberry Pi devices running at home anyways, if those could be the archiving clients it would make a lot more sense!

While trying out the instructions, it was quickly clear that the Archive Team provided images out of the box were not working on the Pi. Could they be made to work, though? (Spoiler: it did, and you can check the results on GitHub.)

Container ARM-ification

The issue was that the Archive Team-provided project container, atdr.meo.ws/archiveteam/yahooanswers-grab is only available for amd64 (x64-64) machines. Fortunately the source code is available on GitHub and thus could check out the relevant Dockerfile. It uses a specific base image, atdr.meo.ws/archiveteam/grab-base, whose repo reveals that internally it pulls in atdr.meo.ws/archiveteam/wget-lua containing a modified version of wget from yet another repo (adding Lua scripting support, plus a bunch of other stuff added by Archive Team). But fortunately this is the bottom of the stack. And this bottom of the stack is based on debian:buster-slim which does come built as multiarchitecture images, providing arm64, armv7, armv6 versions, the architectures that are relevant for us if building for the Raspberry Pi (and other ARM boards, since why not).

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Categories
Admin Computers

Folding@Home on AWS to kick the arse of coronavirus

Folding@Home popped up on my radar due to a recent announcement that their computational research platform is adding a bunch of projects to study (and ultimately help fight) the COVID-19 virus. Previously I haven’t had any good machine at hand to be able to help in such efforts (my 9 years old Lenovo X201 is still cozy to work with, but doesn’t pack a computing punch). At work, however I get to to be around GPU machines much more, and gave me ideas how to contribute a bit more.

Poking around the available GPU instance types on AWS, seen that there are some pretty affordable ones in the G4 series, going down to as low as roughly $0.60/hour to use some decent & recent CPU and an NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU. This drops even further if I use spot instances, and looking around in the different regions, I’ve seen available capacity at $0.16-0.20/hour, which feels really in the bargain category. Thus I thought spinning up a Folding@Home server in the cloud on spot instances, to help out and hopefully learning a thing or two, at the price of roughly 2 cups of gourmet London coffee (or taking the tube to work) per day.

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