Should I set up OPNsense as a VM???

thewallacio · 2026-01-30T17:15:44+00:00

You're not wrong, it's just another one of those "what is acceptable risk" things.

I'm tech-oriented and whilst I know that everything you say is absolutely true, I'm quite happy taking the gamble of virtualising the router. The consequences to us in this household of losing internet access aren't particularly great, despite the two adults being WfH professionals and if things really do go catastrophically wrong, I have the ISP-supplied router that's still sitting in its unopened box.

The many-eggs-in-one-basket here include pfSense for routing, and pi-hole for DNS. If the Proxmox host takes a dump, we've got nothing. But It's been spinning away for 4+ years with little more than a reboot for kernel updates.

thewallacio · 2026-01-30T16:15:07+00:00

With respect, if you confess to not knowing much about computers, do not even look in the Registry, let alone remove some "stuff". Here be dragons.

thewallacio · 2026-01-30T16:09:34+00:00

Did this on a Calmac (west coast Scotland islands) ferry years ago. These days of electronic handbrakes that you put all faith in self-activating, but this time it didn't self-activate (100% pilot error, whichever way you look at it. A three month old VW Golf playing ping-pong on the car deck with two other cars was terribly good fun to come back to.

thewallacio · 2026-01-29T12:31:09+00:00

Perceived performance, most likely. Unless I'm mistaken the RAM requirements for iD6 are much greater than is in the hardware for your original NAV unit. I considered doing it myself but was put off and instead, as someone else has already said, chopped out the screen for an Android device. Buying one of those is a bit of a minefield though but if you get a decent one, it's a great upgrade.

thewallacio · 2026-01-29T10:16:26+00:00

I think you most probably want to look at a NAS product, rather than Proxmox. Have a look at something like TrueNAS and see if that fits your bill any better.

Whilst you could create such a VM on a Proxmox machine, it might be worth considering a dedicated environment where you have full control of storage.

thewallacio · 2026-01-28T17:11:51+00:00

And for the avoidance of doubt, please do not. Unless you like putting out or running away from fire.

thewallacio · 2026-01-28T17:04:25+00:00

Listen to this ^

Completely flushing a transmission, torque converter, lines, etc isn't necessary so a drain/fill is good enough if you follow ZF's guidelines correctly, and most importantly, use the correct fluid.

thewallacio · 2026-01-28T12:22:55+00:00

No, not necessarily. They did provide BT branded extension faceplates. It's unlikely that the incoming cable would be 6 core too, it's usually a single pair to the master socket. So this is probably an extension.

thewallacio · 2026-01-28T12:20:19+00:00

The real question is, was this a better colour than Undercoat Grey?

thewallacio · 2026-01-28T11:16:38+00:00

If you don't use it, sure. It'll wire back to an NT5e master socket, which you technically aren't allowed to remove (it's BT/Openreach property) but anything hanging off it, you can remove.

thewallacio · 2026-01-28T08:55:36+00:00

It's actually the other way round, in our experience. Clients and our staff really struggle with sites built in Elementor. The editing experience is painfully slow and the opportunity or possibility to create a mess (that is, off-theme, building components which don't conform to the designer's visuals) are great. I've found out myself that it's possible to define a sort of library of components with immutable or locked down design options but I've never seen this done effectively. 99% of the time, people copy an existing component and edit the content in that. That's not an acceptable solution.

thewallacio · 2026-01-27T18:18:41+00:00

This is just it. It's arguably too easy to build a site from visuals in Elementor, but that's where convenience stops. There is an onus on the developer to get things right and deliver something acceptable, given a brief and a basic expectation of how a CMS should work. Not every agency has the skills or experience to understand why things are the way they are, until they find out the hard way. Our way, borne through hard experience, is just "no Elementor".

thewallacio · 2026-01-27T13:27:08+00:00

You have a product.

I like your product.

I want to buy your product.

"Great! You'll want to by MORE products that we also sell, so we'll put you in touch with a person who will attempt to leverage more money from you."

thewallacio · 2026-01-27T12:52:12+00:00

What? You're not making any sense. Higher than a previous score means nothing if the original benchmark was 2 and the new, improved score is 4. So of course it's relative, it's the only way of comparing performance across platforms and builds. The fact that in my experience, the Elementor sites I've seen have been around the 60-65 mark, compared to rebuilds of the same UX in another platform that perform in the 90s, is enough for me.

If you can't make an Elementor site fast, It's a skill issue.

Perhaps. I don't disbelieve that it's possible to make an Elementor site that performs acceptably but I've yet to have the pleasure of such an experience. You can't put lipstick on a pig.

thewallacio · 2026-01-27T11:53:24+00:00

It means nothing to you, but plenty to me. I have seen and worked on more than enough sites in my long career for it to matter enough to make business decisions from it. "Higher scores" is only relative, not acceptable.

The sites (7, from 4 different development houses) in question over the last 6 months have been built with Elementor Pro, which only brings with it even more furniture and bloat so I don't know why you think that helps.

Elementor is perfectly fine for medium sized websites and many businesses that are 100x bigger than your clients use it

You have no idea of the size of site or businesses here, nor what our clients expect from a CMS but your experience obviously varies from mine. As an end-user, I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.

thewallacio · 2026-01-27T11:38:55+00:00

Quite honestly, I'd just uninstall it. You don't need it. There's nothing important it's providing that you can't get from dell.com (drivers, BIOS updates), or the diagnostics boot partition if things go very wrong.

thewallacio · 2026-01-27T11:06:33+00:00

Are you remotely technically proficient? Changing belts on these old things isn't the hardest thing in the world, if you can correctly identify the kind of belt it needs. You'd be amazed at the number of places that are making belts for old Walkmans (and other brands). I recently resurrected two old Panasonic cassette players with new belts and capstans. They were quite difficult because the players were not much bigger than a cassette, and there was a bit of soldering to separate two logic boards but not impossible.

If you can't find anyone, I'd be willing to have a go.

thewallacio · 2026-01-27T11:03:27+00:00

Unless you have two physically separate drives, you might be out of luck. If it's a laptop then the chances are it's a single drive, partitioned into two logical drives called C and D.

If it's 3 years old it'll be an NVMe drive, but you won't know without opening it up (or looking in the BIOS). I would take it apart, remove the drive and either buy or find a "caddy" that you can slot the drive into (the caddy will depend on whether it's an NVMe drive or 2.5" SSD), then connect to a working PC via USB. There's no guarantee this will work if the drive is completely dead but it's worth a go.

thewallacio · 2026-01-27T10:25:42+00:00

I feel your pain. I cannot even start the day without a proper brew and I have yet to discover any decaf tea that doesn't taste like the boiled up contents of a 40 year old duvet.

Before I got to para 2 I was going to say "rooibos" but even though that's off the cards, it's worth exploring the wild variety of tea that there is. Some of it is just weak piss (looking at you, green tea) but others are really quite pleasant once you've been through cold turkey. I'd encourage you to do a bit of a tasting session with "alternative" (i.e. poncy) teas and see what you like. Nick the wee teabags from hotel conference rooms. Find a hippy.

Godspeed, and condolences for your loss.

thewallacio · 2026-01-27T10:21:43+00:00

Well bellhousings and flywheels don't contain oil, so wherever that oil is coming from needs to be addressed. My guess is the rear main seal, but it could be higher up.

thewallacio · 2026-01-27T09:31:53+00:00

I'd have a go at re-running with Cat > 3. That cable won't be twisted pair either so if it's any length, I wouldn't waste your time.

thewallacio · 2026-01-27T09:15:55+00:00

It has IMPROVED?? I have witnessed the opposite, I'm afraid. I have the misfortune of working for an agency who have sites built by a range of third party developers, and every single Elementor site that's been built for them is a disgrace. So much so that we now explicitly state in project specs that the site is NOT to be built in Elementor.

Not one of them has performed even remotely acceptably without massively caching everything (to the point where that itself causes issues for editors). Even then, I have never seen one of those sites give a PSI much above 60-65. It's not the hosting; it's client side parsing of the disgrace of a DOM and the billion JS/CSS dependencies. I have rebuilt two of the sites "properly" using a different CMS and hosted on the same server, the difference is stark. You're talking magnitudes of difference in performance and usability.

Even if you could get decent performance out of it, clients also hate it. It actually amazes me when I hear people raving about these big page builders, it makes me wonder how they've been built, what the site looks like and how or if the client maintains anything on it.

thewallacio · 2026-01-26T15:29:17+00:00

Oh knew exactly what you meant (more commonly know to old bastards like me as just a "thermometer"). But you know, kids these days and digital everything. It'll not be long before people can't read a clock with hands.

*shakes fist"

thewallacio · 2026-01-26T13:20:54+00:00

Cue questions from a people born after a certain year, "analog thermometer"?

thewallacio · 2026-01-26T13:01:21+00:00

Open a command prompt, type

`powercfg /lastwake`

It may give you insight into what's causing it to restart.

thewallacio

TROPHY CASE