Mike's Blog: 2017

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Persistent virtual drive on Windows

I needed a persistent virtual drive on my Windows machine and came across this command:

reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\DOS Devices" /v d: /t REG_SZ /d "\??\d:\d_drive" /f

After a restart I found my newly created virtual drive mounted at d:\ with the contents of c:\d_drive. This seems to work better and more persistent than just using the subst command.

Friday, August 11, 2017

Collection of new boards

The ultimate I/O board?
https://grapeboard.com/

10GE Atom Switch/NAS appliance
http://us.axiomtek.com/Default.aspx?MenuId=Products&FunctionId=ProductView&ItemId=24082&upcat=232

Couple industrial boards
http://us.axiomtek.com/Default.aspx?MenuId=Products&FunctionId=ProductInfo&Cat=137&C=Pico-ITX+Embedded+Board

Networking boards
http://www.gateworks.com/product/item/newport-gw6300-single-board-computer

Another 4GB SBC
https://libre.computer/products/boards/roc-rk3328-cc/

Intel i7 on an SBC
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/139108638/lattepanda-alpha-soul-of-a-macbook-in-a-pocket-siz

Board from Bulgaria?
https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXIno-LIME2/open-source-hardware

Piccocluster, no time to assemble arm clusters yourself?
https://www.picocluster.com/

Marvell MACCHIATObin, need 10GE network ports on a small ARM board?
https://www.solid-run.com/marvell-armada-family/armada-8040-community-board/

Espressobin, there are too many features! It may be the board you were looking for.
http://espressobin.net/

Rock960 comes with Rock Chip RK 3399, USB3, 4GB of Memory, 32GB of eMMC, PCIE supporting a M.2 SSD and other compatible cards! 6 cores, 2 x A73 & 4 x A53
https://www.96rocks.com

Rock64 comes with 4GB of memory, USB3 and eMMC support
https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=7147

Le Potato Single Board Computer
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/librecomputer/libre-computer-board-next-gen-4k-sbc-dev-board-for

CrazyPI the best board for robot makers?
https://www.crazyou.net

NanoPi Neo Plus2, the NanoPi that has it all!
http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=196

After Asus now Gigabyte jumps into the SBC market also
http://www.gigabyte.us/Motherboard/GA-SBCAP3350-rev-10#ov

Banana Pi M2 Ultra
http://www.banana-pi.org/m2u.htm

Saturday, July 29, 2017

Collection of SBC OS Distributions

Saturday, July 1, 2017

Collection of Clubs and Bars in Boston

This list is not complete...

Clubs

Bars

Overview

http://bostonnightlife.com

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Pictures of Gizmo 2 NAS

I was thinking to publish a few pictures of the final NAS built in http://xorinox.blogspot.com/2017/05/gizmo-2-becomes-my-fast-nas.html

Some preliminary and naive testing showed that I can read and write about 110MB/s from and to this NAS.

Sunday, May 7, 2017

Setting up Samba on my Gizmo 2

As described in my previous blog I have setup my Gizmo 2 to become my NAS. Now it is time to enable Samba so I can access the volumes with my Windows machines.

Installation

yum install -y samba samba-client

Security

useradd pi
passwd pi
smbpasswd -a pi
smbpasswd -L -e pi
groupadd fastvol
groupadd safevol
usermod -a -G fastvol pi
usermod -a -G safevol pi

Permissions

chown -R pi:fastvol /mnt/fastvol
chown -R pi:safevol /mnt/safevol
chmod -R 0777 /mnt/fastvol
chmod -R 0777 /mnt/safevol
chcon -t samba_share_t /mnt/fastvol
chcon -t samba_share_t /mnt/safevol

Configuration

vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

[fastvol]
        path = /mnt/fastvol
        valid users = @fastvol
        writable = yes
        read only = no
        browsable = yes
        guest ok = no
        create mode = 0777
        directory mode = 0777

[safevol]
        path = /mnt/safevol
        valid users = @safevol
        writable = yes
        read only = no
        browsable = yes
        guest ok = no
        create mode = 0777
        directory mode = 0777

Start & enable service

systemctl restart smb
systemctl restart nmb
systemctl enable smb
systemctl enable nmb

Sources Samba Setup

Gizmo 2 becomes my fast NAS

My Gizmo 2 has CentoOS 7 installed on a miniSATA disk from Samsung. Through USB3 I have connected 2 x NexStart MX 2.5" enclosures that each contain 2 x 1TB SSD 840 Evo from Samsung.

I will create two volumes, a really fast one and a very secure one. The enclosure comes with hardware RAID that is currently configured to RAID 1. So each enclose provides 1TB of disc space right now.

The fast volume will be made of 2 x 700GB and then secure one, for backups, utilizing the rest.

Keep the yum repos updated

yum install -y yum-cron
chkconfig yum-cron on

I need Vim enhanced

yum install -y vim-enhanced
echo "alias vi=vim" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

A bunch of tools I always install

yum install -y bind-utils net-tools traceroute nmap dhclient
yum install -y system-storage-manager
yum install -y nano bash-completion wget curl lsof deltarpm rpm-build yum-utils attr screen git
yum groupinstall -y "Development Tools"

Let's look at the USB drives

yum whatprovides lsusb
yum install -y usbutils libusb

libusb actually enabled the USB 3 ports

Install software RAID support

yum whatprovides mdadm
yum install -y mdadm

Check disk configuration

Using lsblk this is how I have all my disks configured

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0 111.8G  0 disk
├─sda1        8:1    0     1G  0 part /boot
└─sda2        8:2    0 110.8G  0 part
  ├─cl-root 253:0    0    50G  0 lvm  /
  ├─cl-swap 253:1    0   1.5G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
  └─cl-home 253:2    0  59.3G  0 lvm  /home
sdb           8:16   0 931.5G  0 disk
├─sdb1        8:17   0   700G  0 part
└─sdb2        8:18   0 231.4G  0 part
sdc           8:32   0 931.5G  0 disk
├─sdc1        8:33   0   700G  0 part
└─sdc2        8:34   0 231.4G  0 part

Configure RAID

Edit /etc/mdadm.conf

DEVICE /dev/sd[bc]1
ARRAY /dev/md0 devices=/dev/sdb1,/dev/sdc1

DEVICE /dev/sd[bc]2
ARRAY /dev/md1 devices=/dev/sdb2,/dev/sdc2

mdadm -C /dev/md0 --level=raid0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
mdadm -C /dev/md1 --level=raid1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc2

Formatting & mounting

mkfs.xfs /dev/md0
mkfs.xfs /dev/md1 -f
mkdir /mnt/fastvol
mkdir /mnt/safevol
added lines to /etc/fstab

/dev/md0     /mnt/fastvol                       xfs     defaults        0 0
/dev/md1     /mnt/safevol                       xfs     defaults        0 0

mount -a

Check disk configuration again

Using lsblk this is how I have all my disks configured

[root@giz-node-1 ~]# lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0 111.8G  0 disk
├─sda1        8:1    0     1G  0 part  /boot
└─sda2        8:2    0 110.8G  0 part
  ├─cl-root 253:0    0    50G  0 lvm   /
  ├─cl-swap 253:1    0   1.5G  0 lvm   [SWAP]
  └─cl-home 253:2    0  59.3G  0 lvm   /home
sdb           8:16   0 931.5G  0 disk
├─sdb1        8:17   0   700G  0 part
│ └─md0       9:0    0   1.4T  0 raid0 /mnt/fastvol
└─sdb2        8:18   0 231.4G  0 part
  └─md1       9:1    0 231.3G  0 raid1 /mnt/safevol
sdc           8:32   0 931.5G  0 disk
├─sdc1        8:33   0   700G  0 part
│ └─md0       9:0    0   1.4T  0 raid0 /mnt/fastvol
└─sdc2        8:34   0 231.4G  0 part
  └─md1       9:1    0 231.3G  0 raid1 /mnt/safevol

Source for RAID using mdadm

https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Installation_Guide-en-US/s1-s390info-raid.html

Saturday, May 6, 2017

Tools to burn images onto SD cards etc.

Windows

https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager (also allows to create images)
https://etcher.io
https://rufus.akeo.ie

On my Khadas VIM I could not find the command "ping"

Funny, after installing Ubuntu Server on my Khadas VIM I could not find the command "ping". An approach to find commands that so far always helped me was to use apt-file.

apt-get install apt-file
apt-file update
apt-file find ping |grep utils

I also suspected it needed to be part of some kind of *utils*.

apt-get install iputils-ping

And now I have "ping".

Sunday, April 30, 2017

For my MiQi Dev Board I needed to set my own MAC Address

I needed to set my own MAC address because for some reason it changed after each reboot.

vi /etc/network/interfaces

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
hwaddress ether 22:b9:4d:5d:77:94

Sunday, April 23, 2017

Install Ansible on Asus Tinker Board

I found these steps necessary to install ansible on the Linux dist provided by Asus for my Tinker Board (TinkerOS_Debian V1.8 beta version)

apt-get install python-pip python-dev build-essential python-wheel libffi-dev
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install --upgrade virtualenv
pip install --upgrade setuptools
pip install ansible

Remove desktop from Linux dist

Debian based this is the best I could put together.

apt-get purge libtheora0
apt-get purge libcairo2
apt-get purge lxlock
apt-get autoremove
apt-get purge libx11.* libqt.*

This worked with the Linux dist provided by Asus for the Tinker Board.

Enable NTP and set Eastern Time

Once in a while I need to fix ntp and the date/time on my machine.

rm /etc/localtime
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/EST /etc/localtime
apt-get update && apt-get install ntp
systemctl enable ntp
systemctl stop ntp
ntpdate -sb time.nist.gov
systemctl start ntp
date

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Run Phoronix Test Suite on Asus Tinker Board

Do we have building tools

apt-get install -y build-essential
apt-get install -y automake make gcc patch unzip autoconf unzip apt-file

Necessary PHP dependencies

apt-get install -y php-cli php-xml php-gd php-posix php-sqlite3

Phoronix will try to install these anyhow, I found this process faster than if Phoronix installs them in the background, I would not know why

apt-get install -y zlib1g-dev libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-net1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev yasm libpcre3-dev libboost-all-dev libasio-dev libboost-iostreams-dev libjpeg-dev libtiff5-dev libpng-dev gfortran libopenmpi-dev openmpi-bin libmpich-dev mesa-utils libssl-dev libtiff-dev

Install and run Phoronix CPU benchmark

wget http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/download.php?file=phoronix-test-suite-7.0.1 -O phoronix-test-suite_7.0.1.tar.gz
tar xvf phoronix-test-suite_7.0.1.tar.gz
cd phoronix-test-suite/
./install-sh
phoronix-test-suite benchmark pts/cpu

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Inventory of my Development Boards

This is an inventory of my development boards.

4 x Raspberry Pi 3 Model B ($29)

quad core A53 64bit 1.2GHz (Broadcom BCM2837)
1GB Memory
100Mbit LAN

4 x Nanopi Neo 2 ($14.99)

quad core A53 64bit 1.2GHz (Allwinner H5)
512MB Memory
1Gbit LAN

4 x Orange Pi Zero H2+ ($8.90)

quad core A7 32bit 1.2GHz (Allwinner H2+)
512MB Memory
1Gbit LAN

2 x Orange Pi PC 2 ($19.98)

quad core A53 64bit 1.2GHz (Allwinner H5)
1GB Memory
1Gbit LAN

2 x pcDuino8 Uno ($39)

octa core A7 32bit 2.0GHz (Allwinner H8)
1GB Memory
100Mbit LAN

2 x Khadas Vim ($57.99)

quad core A53 64bit 2.0GHz (Amlogic S905X)
2GB Memory
16GB eMMC
100Mbit LAN

2 x Asus Tinker Board ($59.99)

quad core A17 32bit 1.8GHz (Rockchip RK3288)
2GB Memory
1Gbit LAN

1 x Orange Pi Prime ($29.90)

quad core A53 64bit 1.2GHz (Allwinner H5)
2GB Memory
1Gbit LAN

1 x MiQi ($89)

quad core A17 32bit 1.8GHz (Rockchip RK3288)
2GB Memory
32GB eMMC
1Gbit LAN

1 x Gizmo 2 ($89)

dual core G-Series 64bit 1.0GHz (AMD GX210HA)
1GB Memory
1Gbit LAN

1 x Rock64 ($44.95 + $21.95)

quad core
4GB Memory
32 GB eMMC (accounts for 1/3 of the total cost)
1Gbit LAN

1 x Parallella ($149.00)

dual core ARM
16 core RISC
1GB Memory
1Gi tLAN

Collection of Phoronix Benchmark Results

I have run the Phoronix Benchmark Suite on many of my SBCs. This isn't really a scientific comparison, just a collection of the links pointing to the raw results. It's not really useful yet for comparison since sometimes I used a heat sink, sometimes I didn't, different OS, kernel etc...

Orange Pi PC 2

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1704046-RI-OPINODE1A74

Nano Pi Neo 2

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1704134-RI-NANONODE148

Asus Tinker Board

Gizmo 2

Khadas Vim

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1704081-RI-VIMNODE1181

Raspberry Pi 3

pcDuino8 Uno

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1704233-RI-PD8NODE1708

MiQi

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1704253-RI-MIQINODE139

Monday, April 17, 2017

Collection of Dev Board/Projects that really interested me

While looking for the latest and greatest dev boards I came across some really interesting "extensions", articles, projects and other sources.

Audio