COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Tizer]

Good luck!

[Stanley]

What's an SMR disc?

[Pluggy]

Shingled Magnetic Recording. The latest iteration of spinning rust. See my post of 12th March at 21:57 .

[Tizer]

Shingled Magnetic Recording. The latest iteration of spinning rust. See my post of 12th March at 21:57 .

Have you seen my update of 14th March? The Toshiba is now acting like the Seagates - took 90 minutes to back up my usual 11.5GB which took 16 minutes on the first run and only 10 minutes on my old Toshiba. Scan are refusing to give me a refund on the second Seagate Maxtor and claim it works OK for them. I've written to Support at Toshiba and Seagate asking if their external disks are SMR and which work best with Ubuntu Linux 18.04. You never know, they might even reply!

Stanley, here's another article on SMR: LINK The critical sentence is: `Rule of thumb, for active workloads stick to PMR drives. For archive workloads where you only plan to write the data once, SMR should be fine.' In other words, if you repeatedly backup to the disk avoid SMR. If you only put data on it once for archiving purposes then it's OK. What puzzles me is that I don't see the web clogged with people reporting dead slow backups, yet I've now had three disks show the problem and Pluggy 's new one does the same.

[PanBiker]

My router dropped the connection once this morning, it's fine and reasonably dry at the moment. I have contemplated a router fault but have ruled that out as that incidence of drop outs ramps up considerably when it's wet. Going to look back through the thread to see if I can find the first time it started with the fault, I know the previous one to this was January. I will compare them with Stanley's morning weather reports from his walks.

[plaques]

You may have to consider wind strength and direction for vibrating cables. Wendy's weather station may be of help if they keep records. All very technical but that's what you are up against with intermittent faults.

[Pluggy]

Shingled Magnetic Recording. The latest iteration of spinning rust. See my post of 12th March at 21:57 .

Have you seen my update of 14th March? The Toshiba is now acting like the Seagates - took 90 minutes to back up my usual 11.5GB which took 16 minutes on the first run and only 10 minutes on my old Toshiba. Scan are refusing to give me a refund on the second Seagate Maxtor and claim it works OK for them. I've written to Support at Toshiba and Seagate asking if their external disks are SMR and which work best with Ubuntu Linux 18.04. You never know, they might even reply!

Stanley, here's another article on SMR: LINK The critical sentence is: `Rule of thumb, for active workloads stick to PMR drives. For archive workloads where you only plan to write the data once, SMR should be fine.' In other words, if you repeatedly backup to the disk avoid SMR. If you only put data on it once for archiving purposes then it's OK. What puzzles me is that I don't see the web clogged with people reporting dead slow backups, yet I've now had three disks show the problem and Pluggy 's new one does the same.

I've reevaluated my advice on backups. Zip all the files into 1 big file and stuff that on the hard disk. I suspect there isn't going to be a way back from SMR. Of course doing that on an SSD isn't going to do it any favours. Its all downhill from here......

[Pluggy]

..it looks like the problem is going to come down to water ingress somewhere. It could come down to a cracked or broken box on a pole or joints in an underground pit or roadside cabinet...

If this is the case then wouldn't other broadband users nearby be affected? Could you canvas neighbours to find who else is affected? That might narrow it down a bit more. A more drastic ploy would be to nip out at night and bang the poles to see if it affects your broadband!

It's potentially only Ian's line pair that's affected. When they swapped mine out no one else was having issues. It was only the Openreach engineer's persistence that found the issue.

It sounds like you had the same bod as I had when I was having trouble a while back- much the same as Panbiker all went to sh*t when the weather deteriorated , Old aluminium wiring. The initial answer was there were no spare lines they could use. He came back a few days later and said he'd found a spare pair and swapped me on to it. Its been fine since

[chinatyke]

... I suspect there isn't going to be a way back from SMR. Of course doing that on an SSD isn't going to do it any favours. Its all downhill from here......

What a crazy way of doing things. Doesn't this (SMR) render them unfit for purpose?

[Pluggy]

In most scenarios it makes sense, but mass copying is a big negative. Quick at writing, quick at reading, slow as hell at rewriting. The cache takes the edge off some rewriting activity. But it can't do thousands of files.

[Tizer]

I backed up both PCs to the old faithful 500MB Toshiba this morning. About 12 minutes each for around 11.5GB and 20,000 files. Miles better than the 90 minutes yesterday for the new Toshiba!

I got a reply from Seagate support. They asked for details of the disk and I've sent them on. Their message also said:
`For Linux compatibility, All our external drives work properly with any system. They simply require the generic drivers provided by the Operating Systems. So no specific model works better with Linux or not.'

I guess here the words `work properly' refer to the one-off big archive files that Pluggy refers to. Hard luck on anyone who just wants to do a good old-fashioned backup repeatedly on the same disk.

I decided to ask on the Ubuntu Forum if anyone else is having this problem - a search of the forum site doesn't bring up much. But at the moment I can't get onto it. It's ages since I was last there and they've changed everything to what's called `Ubuntu One', so my login no longer works. When I tried to register afresh with this it put me in a never ending cycle of failures. I'll probably try again with a different email address.

Re Pluggy's advice to `Zip all the files into 1 big file and stuff that on the hard disk'. I'd intended to try this but ran into another problem - Ubuntu's integral Archive Manager (also known as File Roller) isn't working on my PC. I can get it's window up but all the words on the menu bar are greyed out and the window itself is blank. Nothing to click. Zilch. I've uninstalled and re-installed, and tried installing with synaptic instead of the Software Centre, and with the Terminal too. Nothing. Just the blank window. It used to be accessible from File Manager but there's no entry there on my system - perhaps that's a change from 16.04 to 18.04. Everything seems to be going haywire at the moment - I blame it on Brexit!

[PanBiker]

You may have to consider wind strength and direction for vibrating cables. Wendy's weather station may be of help if they keep records. All very technical but that's what you are up against with intermittent faults.

I will side with the Open Reach Engineer that it is predominantly damp that will be the culprit. The trick will be getting the next appointment to coincide with when it's at it's worst.

I had Open Reach out on January 24th or thereabouts and commented that it would be the third visit. Prior to that it was on November 8th, I gave up on trying to find the previous two to that. Yesterdays was attempt four to isolate the fault without success. 20 years in TV and 20 plus in IT I am well versed in the nature of intermittent faults.

Hard frost around January 24th according to Stanley's morning posts and November 8th was a dry milder spell with odd showers, The issue there though was noise on the line not total drop out of the carrier, probably all related though.

Speed is solid at the moment 39 down and 7 up, the give away will be when it starts throttling back.

[Pluggy]

Archive manager doesn't work here either. What does work is highlight what you want in the zip in 'Files', right click and select 'Compress' from the drop down menu.

To get over the problem with SMR disks and lots of files would require that the file table wasn't updated but created anew when you added / changed something. Back in the days when you wrote files to none re-writable CD/DVDs they had a file table that worked like that. No standard hard disk format does it however.

I would suspect that the few people who do backups would be on Windows and use the standard backup procedure, which stuffs everything into a few big files, or they use the backup software they put on new disk drives which again compresses everything into a handful (or less) of files.

[Stanley]

Thanks Tiz, I had read the post on SMR but forgotten it......
Nice to see Pennine Weather used as a resource......

[Tizer]

Archive manager doesn't work here either. What does work is highlight what you want in the zip in 'Files', right click and select 'Compress' from the drop down menu.

Thanks for that, Pluggy. I'd never clicked on `compress' in the file manager. I thought it was simply the same as compress in Thunderbird's menu and didn't realise it had anything to do with archiving. Pity they don't tell us when they change things. I'll get back with more info later - just now I'm half asleep after a bad stormy night and need to try and get a bit more sleep before having to visit relatives at 10.30!

[PanBiker]

On a wing and a prayer here for connectivity. I think the theory has been proved. It's raining and has been for some time.

My router is at times in a continuous DSL boot loop, I'ts dropping the signal every few seconds, losing the carrier so losing it's WAN address for the router at the exchange, this in turn loses the Primary and Secondary DNS server addresses so effectively it's dead as far as the internet is concerned. Auto throttling is biting and the exchange has now reduced my throughput speed on the line to around half or less of what it should be, it's been as low as 15Mbs, very unstable anyway.

I have saved out a couple of system error logs not for Open Reach as they are on my wavelength but for the next time I chat with TalkTalk technical support in order to get another ticket raised. I need to wait until we have a forcast of a prolonged period of rain. If it dries up we will be back to square one with no apparent fault.

Will this post?

[Big Kev]

It will

[PanBiker]

It's back up and has held the carrier for 1H 20min at the moment but the exchange has throttled the speed back to 13Mbps a third of what it was yesterday when it was dry.

[plaques]

Our TalkTalk speed is normally 21.9 which is reasonably OK since we are about 1000 metres from the box. A quick check a few minutes ago gave a speed of 5.5. I've never seen anything as low as this before this was followed on subsequent checks at a steady 21.9. No breaks in the supply.

[Tizer]

Pluggy's advice is the answer to my external disk problems. Creating one big file from 11.5GB of data gives me a 9GB zip file in 5 minutes and that transfers in 1 minute to the Toshiba disk. I've sent the same zip file under different names 3 times with no loss of speed. Then I've done a bigger compression of 28.9GB to 16.8GB in 10 minutes and it transfers inn 2 minutes. Marvellous! Thanks Pluggy.

[Stanley]

I wqouldn't even know how to 'compress my files'. I just tell it to copy and it does it. I'll come back and enquire if I ever have a problem....

[Big Kev]

I wqouldn't even know how to 'compress my files'. I just tell it to copy and it does it. I'll come back and enquire if I ever have a problem....

It's a very straightforward process and, if used on text files, saves a lot of space.

https://www.wikihow.com/Compress-a-File ... -in-Ubuntu

[chinatyke]

How much is the Internet used for making payments in the UK? Here in China the young people seem to pay for everything with a 'wallet' app on their smart phones. Every shop has a QR code displayed, even street vendors have them on display including little old ladies with a few home-grown vegetables to sell. It isn't just the big shops: people pay for their drinks in a bar, 10 pence bus fares, anything. Just scan and go. China is very much a cash-using society but it seems like cash will quickly disappear if this trend continues.

QR codes

I'm a dinosaur who has yet to use a QR code although I now have a smart-phone. My friend laughs at me because I won't buy any data (is that the right term?) to allow me internet access on my phone anywhere I go. Seems to me that everywhere you go has free internet access so, in true Yorkshire fashion, why should I pay for it?

[PanBiker]

I have recently downloaded the QR Code for our new Bosom Friends PayPal Giving account. I will have a look and see if there is one available now for the One Guy account. If you are a dedicated smartphone user it's just another way of accessing, information or payment methods.

[chinatyke]

I will have a look and see if there is one available now for the One Guy account.

Who creates the code for an account such as OGFB? I assumed you had to create them yourselves using a QR app.