misc

Adventures with a Qotom C3758R Unit

Posted on by dk

I purchased a Qotom Intel Atom (“Denverton”) C3758R* w/4x SFP+ port “mini server”, with the intention to utilise the SFP+ ports and upgrade my home Internet connection to 10Gbps…

Here are some of the main (pain?) points:

  • I had to obtain the manual from the seller/supplier; I’m plugging it here for convenience…
  • WARNING: VGA-only!
    • I bought the device, more worried about the number of ETH and SFP+ ports than “trivialities” like the display output (expecting anything post-2020 to have HDMI or DP output), so was totally caught off guard when it arrived with only VGA output, with nary a VGA-capable display in sight…
    • I dragged the device to an older Dell 2719H display that was nearby, and “borrowed” a VGA cable from my cousin, then proceeded to start testing…
    • thankfully, a “rushed order” Vention VGA-to-HDMI* adapter came to the rescue soon after – beware that although it supported the BIOS mode, certain other low-resolution text modes are not (looking nastily at gparted‘s keyboard mapping/initialisation screen); I cannot say if the installation of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS image from my Ventoy multiboot USB stick would work through the VGA adapter, as I did the installation using the Dell 2719H display…
    • as a back up, you could attempt to configure and install everything through the console…
  • AMI BIOS with Test MOKs (Machine Owner Key)!
  • Slow start-up w/A-Tech 2x 32GB DDR4 3200MHz ECC Unbuffered SODIMMs* (yes, I may confirm they work, but as of writing this, there is a cheaper NEMIX alternative* – from Amazon Singapore anyway)
    • due to RAM tests, you get a blank screen all the way till after BIOS and VGA output is initiated (and not because of the aforementioned VGA-to-HDMI adapter being unable to convert either – this happened with the VGA-capable Dell 2719H also)
    • I had to set the BIOS options to do start-up memory tests in parallel (which sped things up a bit) (picture from the console redirection through PuTTY):
  • the on-board USB3 controller does not play nice with my IOGear 4-port GUS434 USB3.0 switch* (which I believe is a white-label of the Aten US434*) although it worked just fine on Windows and Mac OSX:

    • repeated attempts to play around in the BIOS’ USB settings ultimately resulted in an accidental USB port disablement – i.e. keyboard lock-out, which meant having to open the thing up to pull the battery, waiting a minute, then plugging everything back in and setting up the BIOS options again (because I hadn’t gotten my USB-to-serial cable and OS console redirection working yet)…
    • TBH, I believe this is a Linux kernel bug, but after many wasted hours, I still haven’t figured out how to fix this…

 

  • dmesg warnings:
    • workqueue: drm_fb_helper_damage_work hogged CPU for >10000us 256 times, consider switching to WQ_UNBOUND
    • ismt_smbus 0000:00:12.0: completion wait timed out
  • Intel X553 port #4 (eno4) doesn’t seem to be working properly (ethtool -m fails), although links can be brought up:

 

  • booting and controlling the unit through the serial console redirection:
    • another rushed order for a USB to RJ45 serial/console cable* enabled me to utilize the “standard” console port of the C3758R (for the arguable use of the word “standard”):
      • from the Qotom C3758R user manual, with my own annotations denoting pin number:
      • screenshot from Cisco’s ASA 5585-X Cable PDF with the “important” bits highlighted:
    • thankfully, by default, the BIOS is set to automatically redirects to the console with the following parameters:

      • you may just wish to change the “ANSI” setting to “VT100+” (like I did before taking this screenshot – the “ANSI” value selected is just for depicting actual values) just to “clean up” the UI, as PuTTY doesn’t seem to handle the ANSI character formatting all that well…
    • searching dmesg post-Ubuntu-install showed ttyS4 as the serial port device

 

So far, so good, I will provide more updates as I go through the process of OS + QEMU+KVM installation, testing of the SFP+ direct-attached optical connectors and RJ45 10GbE modules.

 

*NOTE: This is an affiliate link, so I may get some commission, but at no additional cost to purchasers purchasing through this link. For Amazon Affiliate links, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

CPanel Email Filters

Posted on by dk

As part of managing my own web presence, including a hosted email server with limited users (both in numbers and geography), I tend to try and cut large swathes of spam by simply “binning” any emails that have any association with specific TLDs, like .ru or .us or .cn– whereby I know that my users and I have no legitimate reason to receive any email coming from those TLDs or passing through servers using any such TLDs.

However, it came to pass that some ham were getting caught, but simply looking at the email headers was not helping. Using CPanel’s in-built testing tool was helpful in surfacing which of my rules was triggering the spam trap, but not exactly why (or what part of the email was triggering it).

The triggering rule looked like regex, so I immediately tried to hunt down converted/parsed file to try and copy the rule in converted regular expression form.

Attempting to poke at the ~/.cpanel/filter.yaml and ~/.cpanel/filter.cache and even the /etc/vfilters/<domain> did not turn up the regular expressions I was looking for.

In desperation, I took a quick look at the CPanel test tool results and decided to just copy the regex shown outright…

Unfortunately, pasting that regex directly into a regex test tool did not work…

Continue reading →

When Firefox Does A Microsoft… (aka Forcing Firefox To Listen To YOUR Settings And NOT Update…)

Posted on by dk

So, Firefox decided to drop support for “old technology” plugins… Since I could not find web-extension updates for some of my required plugins or they are not ready yet (e.g. Tab Mix Plus, now called Tab Mix – Links)…

Easy-peasy: install ESR 52.9.0, then disable auto-updates… Done!

Not quite… I booted my PC this morning only to find Firefox, flicking a big middle finger to all its advanced users, had ignored my settings to not auto update – and proceeded to update itself to ESR 60.2…

Obviously, this got me royally pissed as I had to waste time rolling back and setting it up as I originally chose (i.e. no updates); and so I wasted some time to track down and neuter their update capabilities once and for all.

Continue reading →

Windows Refusing to “Open With” Using Notepad++ Portable…

Posted on by dk

So, fed-up with an outdated, “sanctified” version of Notepad++ “published” by the IT team at my workplace on my work laptop, I uninstalled the published version, grabbed a copy of the portable version (choose the appropriate .zip or .7z package) and proceeded to live happily ever after…

Well… Not quite… Whenever I attempted to use Windows Explorer’s “Open with…” context menu option, attempting to select the Notepad++ portable’s executable would not have any result – the dialogue would just continue to sit there…

After some soul Google searching, I stumbled across the solution.

The registry key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\notepad++.exe\shell\open\command was still pointing at the uninstalled, (now) non-existent executable. Pointing it to the correct location made Notepad++ show up immediately as one of the selectable applications.

First Post!

Posted on by kw

Hello Everyone, this is our first post, not necessarily techie, but we all need to start somewhere.  In the near future, we will be looking at reviewing gadgets, IT equipment, software applications or basically anything that runs on electricity (that we have/used or using) and give you our point of views.

OK, so enough of the posting for now, let us dig up what gadgets we have or am using and let you know what we think how well (or not) they are.!