New Fiber and Rebuild

[jcoehoorn]

Two separate events here in the last week I thought might be of general interest:

1. Thunderstorm took out power to my server room. I have batteries, but somehow it switched so fast they didn't pick up. Not sure what happened there, but the important things isthe Untangle machine failed to come back online. I'm still not sure why: everything else was fine, and no hardware was damaged. I'm still using the same server with no changes. Nevertheless, I was able to download the latest 16.2 to a flash drive from my home, along with the most recent backup, install the new system, restore the back up, and everything was good. We were down 2 1/2 hours total, from initial failure, to arriving on site, to diagnosis, to recovery. I continue to be impressed with how the well the backup/restores work: it included not only the WAN connection and interface mappings, but also my custom certificate.

2. I got fiber at home! Yay! I have a brand new 1Gbps (for now) connection. When the promotional pricing ends I'll drop it down to 200Mbps, because -- as I've said here before -- no one really needs more than that at home. It's worth sharing here because my aging home UT server, with it's circa-2012 Atom D2500, only seems able to sustain 300Mbit or so. But, again, I understand what's going on, and it doesn't bother me. It's fun to have faster internet at home than the entire college campus I support. But what really matters is the latency time to my favorite counterstrike server dropped from ~50ms to ~12ms.

[sky-knight]

SSDs are RAM, and if they get some dirty power they will corrupt data. But even still, this event was a fluke and even in the same conditions the install corruption isn't likely to happen again. But yes, Untangle makes that backup / restore very easy. It just reinforces the idea that crap happens, have a backup!

[b.bowie]

Congrats on your fiber Similar issue with Gigabit fiber.... still paying for Gigabit but stuck at 200x200 due to the Untangle issue. https://forums.untangle.com/ng-firew...onnection.html

[jcoehoorn]

SSDs are RAM

This is an older install... still running traditional spinning rust, in RAID 10 no less. Next build will have SSD. But it was a chance to turn Secure Boot back on and do the UEFI thing

[jcoehoorn]

stuck at 200x200 due to the Untangle issue.

I wouldn't call it "stuck". I've just not seen the draw from a home network in real-world situations where anything above 200 is really limiting you.

[sky-knight]

I wouldn't call it "stuck". I've just not seen the draw from a home network in real-world situations where anything above 200 is really limiting you.

I agree, with the backbone being what it is, you need at least 15 machines to make use of a connection beyond 200mbit. And I'm not talking about cell phones, I'm talking actual workstations doing real work. The only thing at home that comes close is 8k streaming.

As for your server with a platter... well I'd be blaming that just because it's a platter! Life's too short to muck with rotating storage!