Quick [tech] Questions Thread

[Chimpy]

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/index.php Is the ranking website I use, should work for what you need. Vaguely.

That is the site I use as well. Intel is very coy on what the actual performance gains are between generations. Basically I have come to the conclusion that for most cases for VMware hosts the following guidelines are good for choosing processors:

This is, of course, dependent on what price point you are wanting to hit:

1) RAM is almost without fail going to be your capacity bottleneck, not CPU power.
2) Always plan on 2-sockets (since licensing for most things comes in 2-socket increments + rule 1, in 2 years of running VMware clusters with dozens of guests per host I have only once run into CPU issues and that was an isolated case due to a poorly coded SQL job that needed tons of cores to complete in less than 36 hours.)
3) Get the biggest on-die cache you can afford
4) Buy higher clock rates if you can,  but buy the most cores you can per socket
   *rule 4 caveat for MSSQL host-based licensing: if you are building boxes to be dedicated hosts for MSSQL servers to save on per-machine licensing, get as much speed as you can out of fewer cores as they charge per CPU core on the host so it gets pricy fast even with good volume agreements.
5) VMware recommends leaving Hyper-threading on in all of their documentation, so your number of vCPUs will be double the number of physical cores.

[apocrypha]

Does anyone have any recommendations for video conversion software?

I'm recording Elite: Dangerous in 1440p and want to shrink the files down without crushing the quality. Fraps is the only thing I've found that records without killing my PC but it makes HUGE files. There are a vast number of free video conversion programs but I have no idea which are a) any good and b) not stuffed with malware. I also know nothing about good ways to compress video.

[Trippy]

https://handbrake.fr/

[apocrypha]

Cool, testing now, thank you.

Oh that works like a charm. Cheers! High res Elite videos coming soon :)

[Strazos]

Anyone have any ideas on why it seems like whenever I watch Netflix from a Mexican IP vs US IP, it seems I get more choices from Mexico? Example - I cannot watch season 5 of Archer from a US IP, but I can from a Mexican one. 

[Lantyssa]

Less copyright restrictions probably.  Canadian Netflix tends to have even fewer shows than the US.

[Chimpy]

Licensing agreements for music, television, and movies are all done by country (sometimes region). Depending on the locale, it may be easier to get things than the U.S. because there is no cable/broadcast channel that airs the show and thus has exclusive rights for a certain length of time.

[Mandella]

I

I'm thinking it's something corrupted on the motherboard related to the networking parts, and that sounds like a new mobo. $150 for a new board and they're fine with that, but would rather know.

This sound familiar to anyone?

I'm a few days late to this tech support party, but have you ran memtest to check the RAM?

What you are describing could very well be bad memory, except for the ethernet part, which might just be coincidence.

Anyway, check it before you get a whole new motherboard and stick bad memory back into it.

[Cyrrex]

Anyone have any ideas on why it seems like whenever I watch Netflix from a Mexican IP vs US IP, it seems I get more choices from Mexico? Example - I cannot watch season 5 of Archer from a US IP, but I can from a Mexican one. 

I tried to clue you in a page or two ago, but maybe I was being too vague.

If you are using a PC, you want to go download a little plugin thingy called Hola Unblocker.  Takes less than a minute.  It will magically transport you to the US version of pretty much everything your little heart desires.  Or any other country that it happens to support.  It is absolutely brilliant for people like us who want the US content from foreign IPs.  It will also get you around that "this video not available in your country" thing.

[Yegolev]

This is, of course, dependent on what price point you are wanting to hit:

1) RAM is almost without fail going to be your capacity bottleneck, not CPU power.
2) Always plan on 2-sockets (since licensing for most things comes in 2-socket increments + rule 1, in 2 years of running VMware clusters with dozens of guests per host I have only once run into CPU issues and that was an isolated case due to a poorly coded SQL job that needed tons of cores to complete in less than 36 hours.)
3) Get the biggest on-die cache you can afford
4) Buy higher clock rates if you can,  but buy the most cores you can per socket
   *rule 4 caveat for MSSQL host-based licensing: if you are building boxes to be dedicated hosts for MSSQL servers to save on per-machine licensing, get as much speed as you can out of fewer cores as they charge per CPU core on the host so it gets pricy fast even with good volume agreements.
5) VMware recommends leaving Hyper-threading on in all of their documentation, so your number of vCPUs will be double the number of physical cores.

Fortunately, I'm not bothered by cost.

The way it works for this customer (and many others) is that there is a standard hardware BOM so there isn't any decision to be made with your points unless there is some additional requirement that manages to exceed the standard.  Using a standard will cut out a lot of work and streamline deployments, provided you do enough of them.  Also standards are good.

At the moment my choice of frames is set in stone, so really all I need to do is figure out how many vcpu to assign to a VM which will take over for a physical Intel frame with eight cores.  The VM engineer said to just assign two vcpu, that works in 95% of the cases.  I find that to be very sloppy but I don't seem to have a lot of tools and I also don't want to spend a huge amount of effort for something that won't matter in the end.  Not this time, anyway.  I asked questions about processor entitlements and pool capping, which seemed to confuse him.

Interestingly, anything with a database (Oracle and sometimes RAC in this case) and this client will insist on a physical machine.  Whatever, it's their money.  Although there might be reasons for this in ESX-land, which is why I want to read up on it.  But you hit on one reason I want a granular approach.  I can tell someone, based on perf metrics from a workload, how many fractional Power cores will be needed and calculate license costs from that.  Easy with IBM equipment, apparently trial-and-error or overallocate-and-pray with Intel equipment.

[Father mike]

I've got an SSD that has started to vanish after 45-90 min of uptime -- both windows and the bios can't see it until I turn off the computer for 10-15 min.  Is this an overheating issue that I can solve or is the drive failing?

If I do need to replace the drive, what is the modern equivalent of Norton Ghost?

[Yegolev]

Ghost is still a thing, but not sure where to get it.  I just hear the Winders engineers talk about it.

[Salamok]

My Samsung 830 ssd came with a copy of ghost.

[Chimpy]

For VMware, always start with as few cores as possible and see if you are getting resource starved. The way the CPU scheduler works, you want as few cores as possible because for a job to be cleared all cores allocated to the guest must be free on the host for it to run (even if it is a tiny task) so a guest with 8 cores allocated will always have to wait until 8 cores are free to get CPU time on the host.

Father Mike: Arconis true image is pretty much the consumer equivalent of ghost that cones with a lot of SSD drives now.

[Father mike]

Thanks for the replies, folks.  I guess I'm off to newegg. 

Worse than the replacement cost is not having my main box while the new drive is in shipping.

[Trippy]

I've got an SSD that has started to vanish after 45-90 min of uptime -- both windows and the bios can't see it until I turn off the computer for 10-15 min.  Is this an overheating issue that I can solve or is the drive failing?

If I do need to replace the drive, what is the modern equivalent of Norton Ghost?

It would be hard for an SSD to overheat itself (2 watts is about the max an SSD will draw). However there may be something else within your comp that's overheating like your CPU or GPU. You should run a temp monitoring tool to narrow down what it might be.

[Father mike]

I use SpeedFan to check my internals every so often.  It gives me blue 'down arrows' (which i have always taken to mean "below expected") on everything except AUX, which is green.  I suspected for a moment that AUX might be one of the motherboard bridges, and it was overheating and not transferring data from the drive, but I believe the MB system checks would shut down before they'd let things get that critical.

The problem is, this drive is my boot drive, so when it goes away, the system crashes.  If it is failing, I want to preserve whatever life it has left.   So I'm not inclined to run it just to tinker/troubleshoot until I get it imaged over.  Once I get it imaged, then I'll poke at it, or let it run so I can examine the failure state more closely.

The reason I suspected overheating was the obscene amount of dust and cat fur in the case (go-go canned air and mini-vac!).  It is shocking how much that has built up in just over a year.  As long as I'm asking for advice, does anyone have good experiences with a HEPA-type room air filter for managing dust, etc. in an office area?  The room is a finished basement, in a house with two cats.  Yeah, I quickly googled it, but the results are all over the map on price and efficacy claims.

[Yegolev]

For VMware, always start with as few cores as possible and see if you are getting resource starved. The way the CPU scheduler works, you want as few cores as possible because for a job to be cleared all cores allocated to the guest must be free on the host for it to run (even if it is a tiny task) so a guest with 8 cores allocated will always have to wait until 8 cores are free to get CPU time on the host.

Wow.  Good to know.

[Hawkbit]

The reason I suspected overheating was the obscene amount of dust and cat fur in the case (go-go canned air and mini-vac!).  It is shocking how much that has built up in just over a year.  As long as I'm asking for advice, does anyone have good experiences with a HEPA-type room air filter for managing dust, etc. in an office area?  The room is a finished basement, in a house with two cats.  Yeah, I quickly googled it, but the results are all over the map on price and efficacy claims.

I've found that running HEPAs actually kicks up more dust and hair, so I end up cleaning the PC more than leaving fans off.  My new routine is to sweep the floor twice a week and run the HEPA for an hour or two after sweeping, then turn it off until I sweep again.  YMMV.

[Strazos]

Anyone have any ideas on why it seems like whenever I watch Netflix from a Mexican IP vs US IP, it seems I get more choices from Mexico? Example - I cannot watch season 5 of Archer from a US IP, but I can from a Mexican one. 

I tried to clue you in a page or two ago, but maybe I was being too vague.

If you are using a PC, you want to go download a little plugin thingy called Hola Unblocker.  Takes less than a minute.  It will magically transport you to the US version of pretty much everything your little heart desires.  Or any other country that it happens to support.  It is absolutely brilliant for people like us who want the US content from foreign IPs.  It will also get you around that "this video not available in your country" thing.

I think you believe I have a problem I don't actually have - I have access to both Mexican and US IPs.

The ONLY issue is that, for whatever reason, on my Mexican IP I cannot use Netflix on the laptop because it says I cannot stream from my location...though my tablet and phone are able to with the "Mexican" selection.

The question was more just because it seemed bizarre to me (though makes sense now, vis-a-vis lack of exclusive broadcast conflicts in MX).

[rattran]

I set up a pair of HEPA filters for a client's printer setup, the dyesub printers are quite sensitive to dust and hair. Worked like a charm.

[Father mike]

Father Mike: Arconis true image is pretty much the consumer equivalent of ghost that cones with a lot of SSD drives now.

Wound up going with Clonezilla.  The Samsung software wouldn't copy the master boot record nor make the cloned drive bootable.

[schild]

Wait a month then go look at a Vizio P series 4k TV if you like what you see get that.

Holy shit, the 70 inch one is only $2,499? Goddamnit.

[Strazos]

Ended up going with this purty one:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IN2WIXY/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I'll have to let people know how it goes when it gets here in a few weeks.

[Yegolev]

Acrobat Pro character recognition and conversion is not 100% awesome.  Is there some other product that works well to create searchable text from scans?

[Salamok]

Acrobat Pro character recognition and conversion is not 100% awesome.  Is there some other product that works well to create searchable text from scans?

I wish you were right but you are wrong, when compared to the competition Adobe is 100% awesome when it comes to OCR.  The exceptions might be found baked in to some expensive enterprise document management systems but I doubt it even then.  A few years ago I tried out OCRopus (back when it was based on tesseract) and it was not fun.  Since then the OCRopus folks have decided to roll their own and it has not yet caught up to what tesseract was capable of.

edit - In the event that I am full of shit please be posting your findings here as I would love nothing more than to eliminate any current or future dependence I may have on Adobe products.

[Yegolev]

Reality accepted: 90%

I'll post back if I find something better than Acrobat Pro.

[Salamok]

Reality accepted: 90%

I'll post back if I find something better than Acrobat Pro.

There is better than acrobat pro but it is another Adobe solution geared towards bulk OCR (think of it as Acrobat Pro - the server edition).

[Chimpy]

ABBYY FineReader is the best OCR I have seen. It is not that cheap though.

[Phildo]

Interesting, I've seen that on some of my clients' machines, but none of them seem to know what it is or why they have it.

[Yegolev]

I believe I need to use DNS servers that do not belong to AT+T.  I used OpenDNS a number of years ago, but not sure if they are still preferred.  Any suggestions?

[Viin]

I'm currently using DNS Made Easy for my stuff. Simple, cheap, no problems.

[Yegolev]

Actually I just need to direct my home router to some DNS server that isn't the ones supplied by my ISP, and I think DNS Made Easy is overkill.  Unless this is the world we live in now... I haven't looked into non-ISP-provided DNS service in a number of years.

Occasionally, name resolution anywhere on my home LAN takes close to or over 1000 milliseconds.  This is a large pain.

[Trippy]

I believe I need to use DNS servers that do not belong to AT+T.  I used OpenDNS a number of years ago, but not sure if they are still preferred.  Any suggestions?

Use Google if you don't mind them knowing even more about you than they already do: 8.8.8.8

[Viin]

Ah misunderstood the DNS question. Yeah Google DNS servers are probably a good option.