[conspire] no wireless card for hostapd in 802.11ax mode, surprises with HD enclosures, moving stuff to another box, chose your hardware wisely

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

My HP microserver just died or probably it is in a coma or need some 
organ transplant (power supply).

I probably killed it in an attempt to change the wireless card from a 
"don't remember" to an Intel AX200. (exibit A)

It had more than 5 years, that aren't few but I've had unbranded boxes 
that lasted more.

Here in Lombardy we're currently in lock down and I've no chance or 
reason to get to my oompa loompa and ask them if they can fix it so I 
can find other uses of this box.

Meanwhile I bought a Dell T140 and I've been pretty surprised about how 
everything went smooth including secure boot and tpm.
My only complain is Dell doesn't provide a repository for their iDrac 
Service Module or actually what they provide doesn't look as something 
I'd relay on

http://linux.dell.com/repo/community/openmanage/

Definitively better than zoom or other vendors that put a deb somewhere 
and you've to regularly check if it has been updated.
ASSHOLES.

Any experience with debian and Service Module?

Despite the huge ammount of time it took to rearrange and move my data 
from my old HDs to my old and new HSs, moving an lxc container has been 
very easy.

My old server had 2 HDs in RAID1 array, my new server has 4 HDs to make 
2 RAID1 arrays, 1 RAID dedicated to the host the other completely 
dedicated to 1 guest.
The space on the guest RAID1 array won't be wasted since I may use it 
for other guests used to experiment.

It could have been better if the enclosure I bought for one of the old 
HD wasn't shitty (exibit B). After I started to encounter several errors 
in dmesg, I learned that some enclosures may have problems with Seagate 
HD, IOMMU bios and usb chipset. I didn't dig enough to actually get to 
the real root of my problems.

Nevertheless I succeeded to have my box up and running and I thank my 
past self for having chosen to put all my stuff in a lxc container 
rather than on bare metal so I could:

1) locally set up the minimum OS needed to run ssh. (iDrac basic, 
upgrading to enterprise was not worth for a 30 sec walk from my studio 
to the server).
As you may guess the server is not on a desk surrounded by several 
monitors and I can't sit comfortably on a chair while I'm doing 
something else.
2) remotely install lxc
3) rsync

If I ran my home services directly on bare metal I could have used rsync 
too but I would have had to use MUCH more care in what I was doing 
risking to screw my system enough I should have had to start over locally.

eg. /etc/network can't be simply copied over...

And in fact I did screw up something.
I started to rsync the whole system, then I realized I could do better 
and temporarily exclude my file archive, so I could start the guest 
earlier and continue the sync later.
So I stopped rsync. Restarted it excluding the file archive, started the 
host, gained access to my emails, launched aptitude update/safe-upgrade 
and thought it was time to rsync the rest.
Shut down the guest, not really needed but I'm lazy and I thought it was 
harder to make mistakes this way. Started rsync and realized that 
resyncing the whole system just to avoid thinking how to exclude what 
I've had already synced since it didn't change that much was NOT a good 
idea.
Not too bad. Difference were small after an upgrade, resync was fast, I 
didn't use --delete, Maildir + dovecot created a new file for all the 
new email I've received.
After this mistake, guest was not willing to start properly. Not a big deal.
Stopped again, excluded once more the file archive, start the guest, 
re-aptitude safe-upgraded.
Profit.

Now my Intel AX200 doesn't want to work in 802.11ac mode (nor ax).
Possibly it will, since there is some activity and interest around the 
problem...

What did I learn?
Considering I perfectly knew that I could have avoided many of my 
problems choosing hardware wisely, not that much.
At least it didn't cost me too much compared to the time I should have 
used to pick up something better (2 x 25€ enclosures, 1 x 25€ network card).

Oh yeah actually I learned something:
a) even simple hardware as an HD enclosure could be problematic
b) not all Intel network cards works smoothly with Linux. I thought the 
chances of picking up a problematic Intel network card were much slimmer 
or not existent.

Now I did what I should have done at the beginning, at least for the 
AX200 and I learnt that there aren't really well supported ax cards, 
that 802.11ax at the moment doesn't seem to give any particular 
advantage over ac in a home environment and it still have to prove 
itself worthy in an office environment with more wifi clients.

At least I could have chosen a wifi card that works in ac mode. Price 
wouldn't have been much different and I could have extended my wifi 
coverage not only for the g mode but also for the a mode.

I'll have to wait 802.11ax get better support. I was planning to replace 
my openwrt router as well mostly because I don't want to upgrade openwrt 
version on the router that orchestrate my lan without an at least 
equally capable router ready, so I'll wait few more months and get a 
chance to have a 802.11ax openwrt router.

HD enclosures seems a relic of the past since usb external drives costs 
the same or less than an enclosure + an HD and portable HD have become a 
sort of commodity. Most reviews that mention Linux are for multi bay 
enclosures/jbod and it's hard to find info on chipset on cheap unbranded 
hardware (and most single drive enclosures are cheap unbranded hardware).

BTW I had problems with this:

https://www.amazon.it/gp/product/B07V6VQKYC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

And I'm not that happy with this one too, despite being advertised as 
Linux compatible, but I didn't have time yet to understand what was 
going on in my dmesg:

https://www.amazon.it/gp/product/B075ZYDR2M/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

If you have any advice on how to chose an enclosure better, they are 
welcome.

Now I've spent plenty of money changing the server and other stuff and I 
don't think I urgently really need to find a replacement for the 2.5" 
enclosure, but next time I may consider buying a more expensive hotswap 
jbod enclosure.

-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
https://www.webthatworks.it https://www.borgonovo.net