Tinkering And Gaming
CodeFX Weekly #45 — 25th of November 2017
much like last week, I’m pretty low of energy. I should be working on one of the last chapters of the book, the one about jlink, but I'm having a really hard time getting started. And as is common for me, if there's a single important thing I should be doing and I'm not doing it, I'm pretty much giving up on doing anything useful. So this has been a week of tinkering and gaming - if you read this newsletter for the Java content, I recommend to skip this one.
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QNAP TS-253A-8G
After long months of “at some point I gotta…” and “I really should…” I finally looked into a local file storage and backup solution, which means I bought a NAS. After about a day of research I settled on the QNAP TS-253A with 8 gigs RAM (at first) and 2 WD Red 4TB hard disks (RAID 1 for full redundancy), which I found to be a great way to get started for about 700 EUR.
Two over four
The TS-253A only takes two disks (as indicated by the first digit), but compared with the four disk TS-453A it is smaller (about three 3.5" HDs instead of five), cheaper (about 140 EUR), quieter (or so I thought; read on), and more energy-conserving. QNAP offers extension units with either five or eight disks, which can be hooked up via Thunderbolt 2, so when the need for more memory eventually arises I can take that route.
Ubuntu!
For me, the killer feature of the TS-x53A series is its dual OS capability. It not only runs QNAP’s own Linux-based QTS, you can one-click install a full Ubuntu right next to it. Small hick-ups aside, it works like a charm! Being able to do with Ubuntu whatever I want (including reboots) without touching QTS will come in handy when I start running Docker images on the latter, for example a local GitLab instance.
With Ubuntu, a wireless keyboard/mouse combo, and hooked up to my TV (4k, which the TS-x53A supports as well), this thing is a full PC right in my living room. Its quad-core Celeron N3150 (1.6 to 2.08 GHz) suffices to smoothly run Atom, IntelliJ as well as simple games. For more, I hooked it up to Steam (more on that later).
Disk chatter
The only downside is the constant disk chatter. Not “constant” like in “continuously ongoing” but there’s a disk access every few seconds (remember that krk-krk sound?), which quickly becomes annoying. It also means that the disks never go to sleep, which sucks if you’re trying not to waste energy.
A first probe into the problem suggested that it was due to swapping. Running two operating systems that sounds reasonable and a closer inspection showed that Clementine (Linux media player) used about 4 GB RAM doing whatever with my music collection. I killed it and removed a few QTS services that I’m unlikely to use and it got better.
It didn’t go away, though, and for a while I considered upgrading to the 453A and putting in a small SSD for the operating systems, using the HDs for storing only. But that would come in at about 300 EUR, which I found a little excessive. And while it should fix the disk chatter it would not actually conserve energy because the larger NAS and the additional disk eat up pretty much exactly what the sleeping disks save.
Instead I looked into upgrading RAM and was delighted to find out that the 253A-8G ships with two memory banks and a single 8 GB module. A second one cost me just over 60 EUR and it’s in the mail as we speak. Let’s see whether it helps with the chatter.
In-house Steam’ing
With Steam running in my living room and my current aversion to work I started playing some games again. Of course I quickly ran into the NAS’ hardware limitations, so I wanted to check out Steam’s in-house streaming.
In case you don’t know about that: Steam allows you to compute the game on one machine (maybe your high-end Windows gaming PC) and use another for input/output (like your living room NAS). While it recommends to use Ethernet between the two, I had no problem doing it over WiFi (I’m not playing low-latency games, though).
My laptop (which I use for gaming) runs Gentoo and Windows and I “obviously” use the latter for games. But, boy, does it suck be used to Linux from an SSD and then boot into Windows from an HD. Worse, if you only do it every few weeks, you have to sit there and watch Windows configure itself for about an hour while blocking the OS — how is that still a thing?
Steam on Gentoo
Since I’m not doing anything useful anyways, why not try to get Steam working on Gentoo? (It’s unlikely that you care about the details, but I put them there to be able to look them up.) As usual I wasted a lot of time being stupid, but eventually it was pretty simple:
- read Gentoo wiki’s article on Steam
- realize I already have a multilib profile
- completely ignore the part about prerequisites
- add anyc’s Steam overlay
- add USE flag
games-util/steam-meta steamruntime - emerge
games-util/steam-metaand add USE flags and accept keywords as requested - play hours and hours of Civilization
Games, games, games
After all of that setup, what did I play? Mainly Civilization Beyond Earth and This War of Mine. But Steam has a sale at the moment and I also got Democracy 3, Reus (looks very promising), Stellaris, and Valiant Hearts. I’ll let you know if they are any good.
I’m also playing boardgames with a few friends and we recently settled on Terraforming Mars and The Expanse, very different games, but both very entertaining.
