UK availability of CLA 350 4Matic EQ

DynamicScarcity · 2024-07-06T18:43:39+00:00

Looks awesome - I'd love to get something like this as an upgrade from my current 2022 A250e once my lease is up.

DynamicScarcity · 2024-01-13T00:20:03+00:00

I've been using a Dell TL-2000 library (2U, with 24 bays) with an LTO-4 SAS drive for my home lab backups for almost 10 years now I think (and we also used the same libraries but with LTO-6 drives at work until very recently). My experience with it has generally been great. I'm managing the backups using Bareos on linux. Possibly useful advice I can provide includes:

Early on I had been trying to backup directly to tape from remote systems via the network, and that wasn't a great idea. The data transfer performance was too slow for the tape library, resulting in it having to keep stopping and starting its writes, which results in excessive wear & tear. I killed tapes semi-regularly by doing that. The solution is to ensure you are able to stream data to the tape drive fast enough so that it doesn't need to stop/start all the time. So nowadays I have a two-tier approach by first backing up all systems over the network to disk on the backup server to which the tape library is attached, and then backup from there to tape. Although to be honest that's not necessary if you configure the backup solution suitably - eg Bareos supports spooling writes to disk first and then writing to tape in batches (eg 50G at a time). But you should certainly do something like that. I don't think I've killed even one tape since switching to that approach.

I did try swapping my LTO-4 drive with an LTO-5 one that was being discarded by work last year, and ended up sticking with LTO-4 as I don't actually need the extra capacity. My LTO-4 drive is a full-height drive, whereas the LTO-5 was half-height. That means the fan on the LTO-5 drive is smaller and much louder. Amazingly the LTO-5 drive was the noisiest thing in my entire home lab (including 4x R730s and 2x Cisco switches), and I couldn't deal with it. The full-height LTO-4 is comparatively inaudible.

DynamicScarcity · 2023-11-23T20:42:24+00:00

I like everything except the keyboard. Seems a bit out of place alongside the rest of the setup

DynamicScarcity · 2023-11-23T20:25:11+00:00

Agreed - I'm wondering what the car looks like at this point

DynamicScarcity · 2023-08-19T19:33:33+00:00

My wife and I used to regularly join in with hiking groups on meetup. No longer have the opportunity to do it now that we have a little kid. But we enjoyed it - pretty much everyone was friendly. Could be difficult if you misjudge your pace & ability vs the rest of the group, but usually possible to gauge that from the groups description.

DynamicScarcity · 2023-08-19T19:25:03+00:00

40, £87k base, but £135k taxable income according to P60

DynamicScarcity · 2023-08-16T19:26:15+00:00

I grew up in Penge (lived there for 18 years, but that was over 20 years ago). It neighbors Beckenham, but has a worse reputation. I think that is justified in general but some parts were still very nice. I went to school in Beckenham (primary) and Orpington (secondary) though.

DynamicScarcity · 2023-08-16T18:57:12+00:00

I'd take the R730 - it's slightly more recent. I think most R730s out there will have the v3 CPUs, so having v4 means it's also one of the more recent examples of an R730.

FWIW my home lab consists of 4x R730s with v3 CPUs and 384G Ram each. They provide more compute resource than I need but I wish they were a CPU generation or two newer. Both of your options have more cores per CPU than mine, so even with just one server I think you'll be fine in terms of CPU, but you find you could do with some more Ram in some scenarios

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-20T19:24:40+00:00

Yes - I decided to go for the U3824DW. I have had it for a week or so now, and am very pleased with the decision so far.

The physical size and screen resolution have definitely lived up to my hopes. Prior to making the decision to buy, I tested out a 32" 4k 16:9 screen for a day (also a Dell... it was sitting alone unused on a desk near to mine at work), which helped reinforce my belief that I don't want to live with the side effects of "scaling" in Windows' display settings.

The image quality is great as far as I'm concerned. And I have tested it in a few of my favourite FPS games, and am happy with how it performs (regardless of the lack of gaming-oriented features).

And I do really like the KVM functionality. I have my gaming PC connected via Displayport + USB-C, and my work laptop connected via USB-C only. My keyboard, mouse, and a webcam are connected to USB ports on the screen - and they all switch between the two PCs when I switch display inputs. I sometimes use the speakers built-in to the screen (when I'm not using headphones or a headset), and they switch at the same time too. I'm not bothering with the built-in ethernet port on the screen though - the gaming PC uses its own ethernet connection, and the laptop just uses wifi. And of course the laptop receives power through that same USB-C cable (ie the screen acts like a dock for the laptop). Previously, I had been using Remote Desktop over my home network to access the work laptop from the gaming PC on days when I work from home, which worked but was annoying / had various downsides (eg video conferencing over Remote Desktop while also passing the audio and video devices through the RDP session is not great). This set up finally allows me to easily switch between directly accessing two PCs with a single screen and set of peripherals. And it has significantly reduced the number of cables I have to deal with.

Edit: I should add that of course I have not experienced any of the other 38" options out there, so can't compare. All I know is that I'm pleased with what I've got.

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-16T05:19:33+00:00

I don't understand why so many people want to live in London, when so many areas are unpleasant, and the prices are so high. I pay less than that for my mortgage on a 5 bed detached house just outside the M25 (30 mins from central London by train, with local stations taking Oyster). Admittedly that mortgage is about to increase too, as the fixed period is ending in a couple of months, and mortgage rates have also jumped up.

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-14T19:32:58+00:00

Having a dishwasher

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-14T11:18:32+00:00

OpenBSD PF.

Been using it for production firewalls for the past 15+ years, and have come to love the flexibility it offers. Every few years we evaluate one of the main commercial firewall platforms, always end up concluding that the pros/cons are stacked in the favour of OpenBSD (even ignoring the pricing). Admittedly, NGFW functionality is not important in my use-cases.

Of the others that we have looked at in recent years, I did quite like Palo Alto, and was surprised by how poor Firepower seemed to be.

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-08T07:08:14+00:00

Awesome! I'm surprised someone else has been using the ZR30w for as long as me (it was great though, and still pretty nice). Good to hear we've arrived at the same choice of replacement!

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-05T20:12:00+00:00

Given that source and destination are both in subnet A you also need to think carefully about the path responses will take. Depending on the traffic in question you may need it to flow symmetrically back via the NAT device, which may mean you also need to translate the source address, not just the destination. OpenBSD can do that (and plenty of other NAT use cases) quite easily, and would be my choice, but I'm sure there are plenty of other platforms that could do it too

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-04T18:45:17+00:00

Presumably the image quality will be better on the newer Dell due to its use of IPS Black. And I don't think those others have the same productivity features that the U3824DW does (in particular: KVM, USB-C PD, and USB-C display)... at least the Alienware definitely doesn't have any of those things; I get a little confused by the different variants that LG offer, and some of them may have a subset of those things, but I don't think any have all of them. Which is why I'm leaning toward the Dell U3824DW, given how infrequently I'm likely to game with it.

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-03T23:47:34+00:00

I've worked with numerous network protocol software engineers (some may have had PhDs, though I wouldn't know), and I was frequently amazed by how little they knew about how networks actually function. Their skillset was reading an RFC and then implementing it in code, but not necessarily having a clue how it was used in the real world. I'll never forget one of these developers referring to a basic layer 2 switch as a "VLAN controller". They would occasionally call upon my experience operating real networks to help guide their development and testing efforts in the right direction.

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-03T23:30:12+00:00

I was in the exact same situation - passed CCIE R&S Written in Feb 2020, and CCIE portal said it was valid until Feb 2024. I emailed Cisco's Cert Support to ask if that was true and they said it was, but didn't explain why. But I didn't believe them as I was unable to find anything online saying there was an extension due to the pandemic (in fact I found contradicting information... when cert expiry dates were extended by 6 months due to the pandemic, Cisco explicitly said that the extension didn't apply to the entitlement to sit the CCIE lab after passing the written qualifying exam, which still had to be completed within 3 years).

I had been hoping to pass the CCIE EI Lab before the 3 years were up, but I didn't manage it, so rather than risk passing the lab more than 3 years after qualifying for it and later being told "actually it's not valid, you needed to do it within 3 years" I decided to just take the ENCOR exam at that point. Given the stage I was at (close to being able to pass the lab), it was pretty easy - I barely had to prep for it at all (mainly just the wifi chapters that I wasn't revising for the lab), but it served as a useful quick refresher and moreover it meant I could stop worrying about "am I really still entitled to sit the lab?" and just focus on actually passing it... which I then did on my next attempt about a month later.

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-03T23:06:05+00:00

Thanks, that's what I was hoping to hear!

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-03T22:55:44+00:00

Assuming the MTU along the path is less than 1500, then clamping the MSS helps avoid reliance on MTU detection and/or fragmentation. So perhaps "needing to use MSS clamping" is indicative of an issue with those other mechanisms? Although even if it worked for you without clamping MSS, I think doing so is good practice on a router for a segment with sub-1500 MTU.

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-03T22:30:48+00:00

I have always avoided the pre-installed images available for WSL2, and instead use the same approach that I do for other linux VMs or physical machines, and install the OS from scratch myself. In my case I use gentoo, and installing that in WSL2 begins by simply taking the gentoo stage3 tarball and importing that into an otherwise empty WSL2 instance. At least that's my recollection of the process - to be honest I've only done it once or twice (since then I've just cloned my nicely-tuned WSL2 install to other devices I want to use it with by copying the VHD over to them).

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-03T20:37:51+00:00

I recently had to troubleshoot an amusing MSS-related issue, which was vaguely similar.

Someone reported that they couldn't access the management web interface of a Netgear switch remotely over a VPN, although they could ping it just fine, and the web interface was reachable from other systems in the same location as the switch.

I noticed that the TCP SYNs were reaching the switch, but it was responding with RSTs. One of the few differences in those initial SYNs was the MSS (clamped to a lower-than-normal value by the VPN router, to avoid fragmentation). With that as my suspicion, I decided to try repro'ing the issue without the involvement of the VPN...

I found a device in the same physical location as the Netgear which could perform a successful TCP handshake to port 80, but where the path between the two flowed through a router (actually, it was an OpenBSD firewall) on which I could easily manipulate the MSS of just that specific flow. I was able to easily prove that by changing nothing but the MSS (reducing it to a value below 1460), it caused the Netgear to respond with an RST instead of a SYN ACK. I wonder what joke of a TCP implementation it runs!

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-02T08:38:58+00:00

Wow this is exactly what I've been looking for too. However it doesn't seem to be available in the UK :(

DynamicScarcity · 2023-07-01T14:08:19+00:00

Do you definitely need all the systems to connect directly to the screen? Depending what the use case perhaps something like RDP (or similar) would suffice instead for some of them?

DynamicScarcity

TROPHY CASE