Cooler and wet. Maybe some sunshine later.
Got rain and humidity yesterday. Lots of both. It kept me inside, since I was home with my student, and my wife was at the office.
So I decided it was time to mess with upgrading my NVR computer and software. I was running ispy Agent on win10. I am very tired of windows updating and killing my recording. Agent has a version for linux…. well. I updated agent and it failed to restart, so I had my motivation.
I also needed to add a much bigger hard drive, which has just been sitting here waiting for a good time. Putting the UPS that’s sitting here in line with that pc has been on the list for a while. Fractal. That’s my to do list.
Had to clear a spot for the UPS and that meant vacuuming up the dust bunnies. Then it wasn’t charged so I got to listen to that beeping for a while. Pulled the pc and opened it up. Blew it out. I had installed the second 4TB drive with zip ties. I don’t remember doing it, but I guess I did. There isn’t any second drive cage in this little HP midsize case. So where would the new 8TB go? Pliers. Case mod. Foam and zip tie. I fit the 4TB in tighter and strapped the 8 to it. It’s pretty clean if a bit tight. Budget models are technically expandable, but they (probably rightly) don’t really think anyone will. Still would have been nice to have the drive cage included. I noticed I still have a ram slot open. I’ll have to look at filling that.
Why leave the 4TB drive? Mainly as a place to archive any interesting video.
Formatted the 8TB drive under windows, made sure the Agent software really was borked by the update. Inserted USB stick and booted to Mint. Decided to just install it as a dual boot, but couldn’t. The stock Dell drive has like a thousand partitions hidden on it– well at least 4. Mint couldn’t or wouldn’t figure out how to just install alongside windows (even though that was a choice) and I couldn’t figure out what the heck I needed to do. So I decided to try installing the Agent software on the live distro…
Which actually worked, after some cut and paste errors, and some user error on my part. Remember that I’m just really sitting here monkey punching the keyboard. But after several tries, I got it installed and started. And it works. It’s pegging all 8 cores, but the video is smooth and clear. I did quickly run out of disk space, because the default install uses the same drive for storage, and there just wasn’t any space. That’s when I tried to point it at my new 8TB drive. Sorry Charley, read only file system. After poking at it, doing what seemed logical and watching it LOOK like it changed the permissions, it still didn’t really.
I shut off recording for the night, and have been just watching to see if the server is stable, which was my other issue with the software running on windows. (agent runs as a server, you interact with it using a browser.) It’s always disconnecting from the server and I get a blank screen rather than the camera views. So far it’s been stable and hasn’t disconnected yet.
Today I’ll be swapping the main drive for a blank and installing Mint for real. I’ll have to reinstall all the codecs, software, and settings but hopefully that will be good and stable for a long time after that.
I might boot back to windows to do the file deleting and space clearing I want to do on the 4TB first, just because I’m more familiar with it.
All in all it’s more messing around than I wanted, but MS is making it increasingly clear that they consider your pc to be theirs and they’ll do what they want, whenever they want. I don’t care for that.
I’ve also got to pick up a couple of things today. Wife is working from home so she can watch the younger one while I go out.
More household stuff from the auctions. I’ve created a monster.
The news isn’t getting any better. Biden would be cooked, resigning in disgrace if he weren’t their only hope to defeat Orangeman. They literally can’t acknowledge that he’s crooked because of what they’ve got invested in him emotionally. HE can bow out, but I don’t think he will. I do expect a rash of single vehicle crashes, and overdose/suicide/mystery deaths. I expect some other distractions too.
Stay away from crowds. And keep stacking.
nick