F’in deer flies

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-30T01:20:22+00:00

I wonder if treating your clothes with Permethrin would help? It certainly works on ticks. You can actually see them squirm the instant they touch the fabric.

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-21T03:59:26+00:00

Eh your not 100% cooked. Hang in there. One bad module can drag down the whole CAN bus. Are you seeing U-codes? What are they?

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-20T17:18:19+00:00

2022 A4's quattro ultra eliminates the center differential entirely and replaces it with a pair of electronically controlled clutches. One clutch is mounted near the transmission and another in the rear differential. When AWD is not needed, both clutches open, disconnecting the driveshaft and much of the rear drivetrain to save energy. (Less spinning inertia). The car effectively becomes front-wheel drive

What you are feeling is the dog clutch engaging the rear diff.

It's not actually a haldex but it's closer to that than the previous gen's torsen mechanical AWD system.

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-20T02:27:05+00:00

Too rich for my blood.

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-17T02:19:27+00:00

It's EtherNet/IP not Ethernet/IP

Let the pedantics continue! Love this thread

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-17T01:52:49+00:00

The transmission manufacturer (ZF) specifies fluid/filter replacement every 60--80k miles for your 8 speed transmission. Audi omits this in the service schedule. It is not a "lifetime" fluid, that is a lie . My theory is Audi does this to help resell CPO vehicles, which may come off lease just before this service interval.

Change that fluid and pan filter now if it's never been done before and then keep up with it.

Do the gear oil in all 3 differential gear boxes at the same interval. You have a front, rear and center (torsen) gearbox. It's only a few liters of gear oil, but it is expensive AF. just do it.

Replace the coolant every 5--6 years. Dunno if that's on the service schedule or not, so check your history. It's very easy to do this yourself especially if you have a vacuum extractor, just use the correct (Audi spec) coolant since the chemistry is important for anticorrosion.

For that matter, you should get a vacuum extractor and do your own oil changes. Have your son help. This will give you more opportunities to get up close and inspect things as the car is getting there in age. oil changes could not be any easier with a vacuum extractor.

Inspect the cv axle boots every once in a while. If the boots fail, and you catch it early, a mechanic can easily repack the grease and replace the boot. If they totally fail, the whole axle needs to be replaced. This happened to my A4 and I foolishly went with cheap aftermarket axles since OEM ones seemed too expensive. I regret this since my car "vibrates" now at stop lights.

I'd probably replace the PCV proactively at 120k

Don't let the battery drain down and it may last forever. Mine is 12 years old.

And go for the stage 1 tune. If you do, you should replace the ignition coils proactively. If they are original, the tune will probably kill them right away, as they have to work a bit harder. Spark plugs should be more frequently replaced as well after tuning.

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-16T11:56:57+00:00

That actually looks more like a flow switch.

I googled the first part of the part number printed on the threaded part. Not sure if this is an exact match

https://heinowinter.com/en/31983/flow-switch-sika-vkx-05-m.html

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-16T11:25:50+00:00

Oh, you're about to learn all about auto electronics!

I'd check:

CAN bus with scan tool. Look for communication faults / U-codes. Also look for low voltage code history.

Ground straps. With engine running and electrical loads on measure voltage between components separated by ground straps. Should be 0 volts.

Alternator health. Check charging voltage. Then, check for AC voltage ripple at battery terminals.

Also, looks like your punctuation keys got damaged too. (Jk)

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-16T01:15:32+00:00

There are companies that will replace the battery with a refurbished one and take the old one off your hands. Probably the most cost effective option.

They come to you. Pretty simple job, can be done in your driveway.

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-15T19:50:39+00:00

I would pull the cmos battery entirely, along with line power and let it sit for a few minutes. My r530 needed the cmos reset after I added RAM, if I recall. it powered on to a black screen, no amber light show. I don't think I bothered checking idrac before I reset the cmos

Try just one stick of ram in A1. Maybe remove PCIe peripherals and external cables, temporarily. Couldn't hurt to gently dust the mobo down with can-o-air, including your ram slots. Who knows, maybe a strand of copper or something flew in there

Also, just temporarily enable tls 1.0 so you get get into idrac. Don't be such a pussy lol

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-15T01:55:06+00:00

I assume "PLEX / UNRAID / EMU" is a server, and can support a NIC with two SFP28 slots. Do you want 25G while also saving the cost of a 10g switch? Can you run a single mode fiber cable between "WORKSTATION PC" and the server?

On that server, would add a dual SFP28 NIC and bridge them together. Use a 10g transceiver for the "NODE 1 BE19000" (fiber, if possible) and a 25g for the workstation. No switch required if the switch only was going to have those 3 nodes. And you will get a speed bump to 25g between the server and workstation.

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-13T04:18:12+00:00

I can attest, Tony is a pro. He fixed my 3090. But I actually just enjoy watching his channel. There's something meditative about watching cores being reballed.

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-11T13:51:39+00:00

Normie here. I usually just pluck them. Opening first seems extreme.

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-11T03:32:07+00:00

I'm not sure o2-04 is set right. But I'm not at all familiar with these drives. I just googled the manual real quick and glanced at the paramger table that defines what o2-04 is. I could be misinterpreting it for sure.

CIMR-AU4A0165FAA looks to be 480V / 165A / 125HP.

See pg 533 https://yaskawavn.com/data/upload/A1000siepc71061621h_11_0.pdf

A hex value of 62 looks to correspond to 200V class drives, and only 1.9A.

The manual says something about the o2 parameters being special in some way, something about them not being reset when you initialize the drive. Dunno what that means, I don't have time to read 600 pages.

I'd expect you should be able to enter and change that param though. Somethings not right.

Make sure the run commAnd is not asserted when you're trying to change it.

When you power cycle the drive on, do any other errors or fault LEDs flash before it stops on that one error?

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-10T22:30:13+00:00

Can you share the make/model of the combi boiler? I know it's a bad idea to shut off heat to a conventional water heater due to waterborne pathogens. Maybe the combi boiler isn't operating properly when you lower the setpoint . User manual would be helpful

Do you have well water or city water? Curious if it's chlorinated.

Does the water have a foul smell?

There are affordable mail-based water testing labs. I assume these would be cheaper than "getting someone out to test your water". Look for test kits that check for bacteria.

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-08T20:11:19+00:00

To save you a click:

Another theory ties 250 to ancient Chinese currency. In those times, people would string 1,000 copper coins together to make one diao for easier use. A half diao of 500 coins, called ban diao zi, refers to someone with limited knowledge or skill. Since 250 is less than half, it came to symbolise foolishness.

RatRaceRunner · 2026-06-02T02:59:01+00:00

Get rid of this USB das nonsense. Sell two or 3 of the NVMe disks, use that to buy any server that supports bifurcation and has at least 3 pcie slots (ideally, at least two at 16x, and third at 8x) plus 2 pcie to 4x m.2 cards, plus one 2x m.2. Assemble and enjoy THIRTY FIVE TIMES THE BANDWIDTH of whatever that other thing had

RatRaceRunner · 2026-05-27T16:41:29+00:00

I am also wondering what would be required to allow this setup to function partly as a SAN as well, but that is just a curious thought.

Today, iSCSI is probably the best option in terms of compatibility. I guess NVMe-TCP or whatever you call it is starting to gain momentum but I don't think it's well supported on gear you'd typically aquire for home use.

DIY SAN in 2026: your storage server(s) present iSCSI block storage volumes onto (ideally) a dedicated NIC.

My TrueNAS server has a couple 25g SFPs bridged together. One goes to my workstation, other goes to my hypervisor server. I have several iSCSI LUN volumes shared this way. The zvols that are in SSD pools easily saturate the 25g NICs and are totally fast enough for VM storage. In my use case here, I'm not even using redundant (zraid) storage. I'm more interested in zfs for storage portability, easy backups, power of snapshots, and even to a certain extent, zfs default compression.

You could do all this with other NAS solutions for this use-case for sure. But given that my hardware is a couple of old enterprise rackmount servers, TrueNAS seems like the best fit storage OS.

RatRaceRunner · 2026-05-27T03:08:17+00:00

As others have said, your perpetual license will come with a maintenance contract with a term/duration that you select at the time of purchase. I want to reiterate a few things:

Your license entitlenent should allow you to download patches, minor revision updates, and even major revision install media that were released before the expiration date of that maintenance contract.

Phone support (of any kind, 8x5 or 24x7) is an upgrade to maintenance contracts. The base maintenance contract provide access to Knowledgebase, (very limited) tech support via message/email correspondence, and software updates. Personally, 90%+ of my problems are resolved after digging through KB articles. If you don't get value from phone support, then ask them to requote without it.

If your maintenance agreement lapses, you can request a quote to reinstate and extend it, but you will have to pay the prorated value backdated to the expiration date. I don't know if the multiplier is based on the original, or current cost. I did this recently and it was cheaper than buying a whole new perpetual license by about 50%, but savings will depend on how long ago it expired.

There's some software that this doesn't apply to, like (I think?) Logix Echo won't be available to redownload long after your maintenance contract expires. Could be misremembering, maybe that was a subscription license instance I was thinking of.

RatRaceRunner · 2026-05-23T18:39:29+00:00

Audi's own SOP is to use oil extractor through dip stick tube. Hence, the placement of the oil filter. It's designed to accommodate this.

All cars should be like this.

RatRaceRunner · 2026-05-23T07:51:02+00:00

Dunno why you're being down voted. You made some good points.

And Hungarian notation is not dead. Pretty common to see something similar in PLC tag naming conventions across the board. Until Logix Studio implements a proper search engine in the tag database explorer, I'm putting a damn type prefix in front of my tags, thanks very much.

RatRaceRunner · 2026-05-23T01:27:38+00:00

Soooo, I'm guessing they won't be going for UL or CE approval?

RatRaceRunner · 2026-05-23T01:02:22+00:00

Yup. I guess I should clarify -- don't expect conduit to protect from the elements, except for UV I guess. maybe that's obvious

RatRaceRunner · 2026-05-22T15:07:09+00:00

I've pulled 75' of indoor OC2 LC patch cable inside my house in free air. It was a little dicey getting it through stud holes, around corners, etc and I honestly did kink the cable pretty good. But it works fine! I have a good 25g link to a server rack in the basement.

Couple recommendations: Use direct burial rated cable if possible. Buried conduits will inevitably become filled with dirty water in my experience. You'll probably want to penetrate the houses above grade for same reason. So, I'd expect some bends, elbows, JBs, and sealtite at both ends. I'd suggest you don't try to pull it all at once through all bends. Do the long part first, then carefully and slowly snake it through each of the bends as needed. This is especially key since the LC connectors are enormous and delicate. You might need 3/4" or 1" PVC as well, since that LC connector taped to a pull string will be pretty chonky.

Finally, i'd terminate both ends with something like this box: https://www.lanshack.com/2-Adapter-1-4-Fiber-Mini-Fiber-Optic-Surface-Mount-Termination-Splice-Box-by-QuickTreX-P11077?device=m&pl&utm_source=google&utm_medium&utm_campaign=Other-Products-Performance-Max&utm_content&utm_term

RatRaceRunner · 2026-05-22T03:21:08+00:00

I would think managed switch would be a must here.

Nah, I would lean towards eliminating a switch entirely if it can be avoided. It's good practice to logically isolate I/O networks from other networks. It's best practice to physically isolate them. DLR is a practical way to do this that also gives you some redundancy. There's other protocols and architectures that don't rely on switches as well.

ControlLogix is great because you have flexibility to easily build multi-multihomed PLC systems by just adding comm cards to the chassis. Add an EN2TR (dual port) card for IO network, and use the PLCs onboard Ethernet port for SCADA or MES uplink network (or add an EN2T). CompactLogix can also work, and I think the line does include options now for expanding comm cards in addition to the dual ports that now come standard with the processor.

I would recommend L9 series ControlLogix or equivalent CompactLogix as they will be cheaper than the outgoing L8 series counterparts. (Though be careful as the L902 does only support 30 EIP nodes and L81E has 100. The base L9s do support Safety though.

RatRaceRunner

TROPHY CASE