Older blog entries for etbe (starting at number 1157)

BTRFS Training

Some years ago Barwon South Water gave LUV 3 old 1RU Sun servers for any use related to free software. We gave one of those servers to the Canberra makerlab and another is used as the server for the LUV mailing lists and web site and the 3rd server was put aside for training. The servers have hot-swap 15,000rpm SAS disks – IE disks that have a replacement cost greater than the budget we have for hardware. As we were given a spare 70G disk (and a 140G disk can replace a 70G disk) the LUV server has 2*70G disks and the 140G disks (which can’t be replaced) are in the server for training.

On Saturday I ran a BTRFS and ZFS training session for the LUV Beginners’ SIG. This was inspired by the amount of discussion of those filesystems on the mailing list and the amount of interest when we have lectures on those topics.

The training went well, the meeting was better attended than most Beginners’ SIG meetings and the people who attended it seemed to enjoy it. One thing that I will do better in future is clearly documenting commands that are expected to fail and documenting how to login to the system. The users all logged in to accounts on a Xen server and then ssh’d to root at their DomU. I think that it would have saved a bit of time if I had aliased commands like “btrfs” to “echo you must login to your virtual server first” or made the shell prompt at the Dom0 include instructions to login to the DomU.

Each user or group had a virtual machine. The server has 32G of RAM and I ran 14 virtual servers that each had 2G of RAM. In retrospect I should have configured fewer servers and asked people to work in groups, that would allow more RAM for each virtual server and also more RAM for the Dom0. The Dom0 was running a BTRFS RAID-1 filesystem and each virtual machine had a snapshot of the block devices from my master image for the training. Performance was quite good initially as the OS image was shared and fit into cache. But when many users were corrupting and scrubbing filesystems performance became very poor. The disks performed well (sustaining over 100 writes per second) but that’s not much when shared between 14 active users.

The ZFS part of the tutorial was based on RAID-Z (I didn’t use RAID-5/6 in BTRFS because it’s not ready to use and didn’t use RAID-1 in ZFS because most people want RAID-Z). Each user had 5*4G virtual disks (2 for the OS and 3 for BTRFS and ZFS testing). By the end of the training session there was about 76G of storage used in the filesystem (including the space used by the OS for the Dom0), so each user had something like 5G of unique data.

We are now considering what other training we can run on that server. I’m thinking of running training on DNS and email. Suggestions for other topics would be appreciated. For training that’s not disk intensive we could run many more than 14 virtual machines, 60 or more should be possible.

Below are the notes from the BTRFS part of the training, anyone could do this on their own if they substitute 2 empty partitions for /dev/xvdd and /dev/xvde. On a Debian/Jessie system all that you need to do to get ready for this is to install the btrfs-tools package. Note that this does have some risk if you make a typo. An advantage of doing this sort of thing in a virtual machine is that there’s no possibility of breaking things that matter.

  1. Making the filesystem
    1. Make the filesystem, this makes a filesystem that spans 2 devices (note you must use the-f option if there was already a filesystem on those devices):
      mkfs.btrfs /dev/xvdd /dev/xvde
    2. Use file(1) to see basic data from the superblocks:
      file -s /dev/xvdd /dev/xvde
    3. Mount the filesystem (can mount either block device, the kernel knows they belong together):
      mount /dev/xvdd /mnt/tmp
    4. See a BTRFS df of the filesystem, shows what type of RAID is used:
      btrfs filesystem df /mnt/tmp
    5. See more information about FS device use:
      btrfs filesystem show /mnt/tmp
    6. Balance the filesystem to change it to RAID-1 and verify the change, note that some parts of the filesystem were single and RAID-0 before this change):
      btrfs balance start -dconvert=raid1 -mconvert=raid1 -sconvert=raid1 –force /mnt/tmp
      btrfs filesystem df /mnt/tmp
    7. See if there are any errors, shouldn’t be any (yet):
      btrfs device stats /mnt/tmp
    8. Copy some files to the filesystem:
      cp -r /usr /mnt/tmp
    9. Check the filesystem for basic consistency (only checks checksums):
      btrfs scrub start -B -d /mnt/tmp
  2. Online corruption
    1. Corrupt the filesystem:
      dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xvdd bs=1024k count=2000 seek=50
    2. Scrub again, should give a warning about errors:
      btrfs scrub start -B /mnt/tmp
    3. Check error count:
      btrfs device stats /mnt/tmp
    4. Corrupt it again:
      dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xvdd bs=1024k count=2000 seek=50
    5. Unmount it:
      umount /mnt/tmp
    6. In another terminal follow the kernel log:
      tail -f /var/log/kern.log
    7. Mount it again and observe it correcting errors on mount:
      mount /dev/xvdd /mnt/tmp
    8. Run a diff, observe kernel error messages and observe that diff reports no file differences:
      diff -ru /usr /mnt/tmp/usr/
    9. Run another scrub, this will probably correct some errors which weren’t discovered by diff:
      btrfs scrub start -B -d /mnt/tmp
  3. Offline corruption
    1. Umount the filesystem, corrupt the start, then try mounting it again which will fail because the superblocks were wiped:
      umount /mnt/tmp
      dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xvdd bs=1024k count=200
      mount /dev/xvdd /mnt/tmp
      mount /dev/xvde /mnt/tmp
    2. Note that the filesystem was not mountable due to a lack of a superblock. It might be possible to recover from this but that’s more advanced so we will restore the RAID.
      Mount the filesystem in a degraded RAID mode, this allows full operation.
      mount /dev/xvde /mnt/tmp -o degraded
    3. Add /dev/xvdd back to the RAID:
      btrfs device add /dev/xvdd /mnt/tmp
    4. Show the filesystem devices, observe that xvdd is listed twice, the missing device and the one that was just added:
      btrfs filesystem show /mnt/tmp
    5. Remove the missing device and observe the change:
      btrfs device delete missing /mnt/tmp
      btrfs filesystem show /mnt/tmp
    6. Balance the filesystem, not sure this is necessary but it’s good practice to do it when in doubt:
      btrfs balance start /mnt/tmp
    7. Umount and mount it, note that the degraded option is not needed:
      umount /mnt/tmp
      mount /dev/xvdd /mnt/tmp
  4. Experiment
    1. Experiment with the “btrfs subvolume create” and “btrfs subvolume delete” commands (which act like mkdir and rmdir).
    2. Experiment with “btrfs subvolume snapshot SOURCE DEST” and “btrfs subvolume snapshot -r SOURCE DEST” for creating regular and read-only snapshots of other subvolumes (including the root).

Related posts:

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  3. Why I Use BTRFS I’ve just had to do yet another backup/format/restore operation on...

Syndicated 2015-08-18 05:22:42 from etbe – Russell Coker

Systemd Notes

A few months ago I gave a lecture about systemd for the Linux Users of Victoria. Here are some of my notes reformatted as a blog post:

Scripts in /etc/init.d can still be used, they work the same way as they do under sysvinit for the user. You type the same commands to start and stop daemons.

To get a result similar to changing runlevel use the “systemctl isolate” command. Runlevels were never really supported in Debian (unlike Red Hat where they were used for starting and stopping the X server) so for Debian users there’s no change here.

The command systemctl with no params shows a list of loaded services and highlights failed units.

The command “journalctl -u UNIT-PATTERN” shows journal entries for the unit(s) in question. The pattern uses wildcards not regexs.

The systemd journal includes the stdout and stderr of all daemons. This solves the problem of daemons that don’t log all errors to syslog and leave the sysadmin wondering why they don’t work.

The command “systemctl status UNIT” gives the status and last log entries for the unit in question.

A program can use ioctl(fd, TIOCSTI, …) to push characters into a tty buffer. If the sysadmin runs an untrusted program with the same controlling tty then it can cause the sysadmin shell to run hostile commands. The system call setsid() to create a new terminal session is one solution but managing which daemons can be started with it is difficult. The way that systemd manages start/stop of all daemons solves this. I am glad to be rid of the run_init program we used to use on SE Linux systems to deal with this.

Systemd has a mechanism to ask for passwords for SSL keys and encrypted filesystems etc. There have been problems with that in the past but I think they are all fixed now. While there is some difficulty during development the end result of having one consistent way of managing this will be better than having multiple daemons doing it in different ways.

The commands “systemctl enable” and “systemctl disable” enable/disable daemon start at boot which is easier than the SysVinit alternative of update-rc.d in Debian.

Systemd has built in seat management, which is not more complex than consolekit which it replaces. Consolekit was installed automatically without controversy so I don’t think there should be controversy about systemd replacing consolekit.

Systemd improves performance by parallel start and autofs style fsck.

The command systemd-cgtop shows resource use for cgroups it creates.

The command “systemd-analyze blame” shows what delayed the boot process and
systemd-analyze critical-chain” shows the critical path in boot delays.

Sysremd also has security features such as service private /tmp and restricting service access to directory trees.

Conclusion

For basic use things just work, you don’t need to learn anything new to use systemd.

It provides significant benefits for boot speed and potentially security.

It doesn’t seem more complex than other alternative solutions to the same problems.

https://wiki.debian.org/systemd

http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Optimizations/

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/security.html

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Syndicated 2015-01-12 18:07:00 from etbe - Russell Coker

Conference Suggestions

LCA 2015 is next week so it seems like a good time to offer some suggestions for other delegates based on observations of past LCAs. There’s nothing LCA specific about the advice, but everything is based on events that happened at past LCAs.

Don’t Oppose a Lecture

Question time at the end of a lecture isn’t the time to demonstrate that you oppose everything about the lecture. Discussion time between talks at a mini-conf isn’t a time to demonstrate that you oppose the entire mini-conf. If you think a lecture or mini-conf is entirely wrong then you shouldn’t attend.

The conference organisers decide which lectures and mini-confs are worthy of inclusion and the large number of people who attend the conference are signalling their support for the judgement of the conference organisers. The people who attend the lectures and mini-confs in question want to learn about the topics in question and people who object should be silent. If someone gives a lecture about technology which appears to have a flaw then it might be OK to ask one single question about how that issue is resolved, apart from that the lecture hall is for the lecturer to describe their vision.

The worst example of this was between talks at the Haecksen mini-conf last year when an elderly man tried at great length to convince me that everything about feminism is wrong. I’m not sure to what degree the Haecksen mini-conf is supposed to be a feminist event, but I think it’s quite obviously connected to feminism – which is of course was why he wanted to pull that stunt. After he discovered that I was not going to be convinced and that I wasn’t at all interested in the discussion he went to the front of the room to make a sexist joke and left.

Consider Your Share of Conference Resources

I’ve previously written about the length of conference questions [1]. Question time after a lecture is a resource that is shared among all delegates. Consider whether you are asking more questions than the other delegates and whether the questions are adding benefit to other people. If not then send email to the speaker or talk to them after their lecture.

Note that good questions can add significant value to the experience of most delegates. For example when a lecturer appears to be having difficulty in describing their ideas to the audience then good questions can make a real difference, but it takes significant skill to ask such questions.

Dorm Walls Are Thin

LCA is one of many conferences that is typically held at a university with dorm rooms offered for delegates. Dorm rooms tend to have thinner walls than hotel rooms so it’s good to avoid needless noise at night. If one of your devices is going to make sounds at night please check the volume settings before you start it. At one LCA I was startled at about 2AM but the sound of a very loud porn video from a nearby dorm room, the volume was reduced within a few seconds, but it’s difficult to get to sleep quickly after that sort of surprise.

If you set an alarm then try to avoid waking other people. If you set an early alarm and then just get up then other people will get back to sleep, but pressing “snooze” repeatedly for several hours (as has been done in the past) is anti-social. Generally I think that an alarm should be at a low volume unless it is set for less than an hour before the first lecture – in which case waking people in other dorm rooms might be doing them a favor.

Phones in Lectures

Do I need to write about this? Apparently I do because people keep doing it!

Phones can be easily turned to vibrate mode, most people who I’ve observed taking calls in LCA lectures have managed this but it’s worth noting for those who don’t.

There are very few good reasons for actually taking a call when in a lecture. If the hospital calls to tell you that they have found a matching organ donor then it’s a good reason to take the call, but I can’t think of any other good example.

Many LCA delegates do system administration work and get calls at all times of the day and night when servers have problems. But that isn’t an excuse for having a conversation in the middle of the lecture hall while the lecture is in progress (as has been done). If you press the green button on a phone you can then walk out of the lecture hall before talking, it’s expected that mobile phone calls sometimes have signal problems at the start of the call so no-one is going to be particularly surprised if it takes 10 seconds before you say hello.

As an aside, I think that the requirement for not disturbing other people depends on the number of people who are there to be disturbed. In tutorials there are fewer people and the requirements for avoiding phone calls are less strict. In BoFs the requirements are less strict again. But the above is based on behaviour I’ve witnessed in mini-confs and main lectures.

Smoking

It is the responsibility of people who consume substances to ensure that their actions don’t affect others. For smokers that means smoking far enough away from lecture halls that it’s possible for other delegates to attend the lecture without breathing in smoke. Don’t smoke in the lecture halls or near the doorways.

Also using an e-cigarette is still smoking, don’t do it in a lecture hall.

Photography

Unwanted photography can be harassment. I don’t think there’s a need to ask for permission to photograp people who harass others or break the law. But photographing people who break the social agreement as to what should be done in a lecture probably isn’t. At a previous LCA a man wanted to ask so many questions at a keynote lecture that he had a page of written notes (seriously), that was obviously outside the expected range of behaviour – but probably didn’t justify the many people who photographed him.

A Final Note

I don’t think that LCA is in any way different from other conferences in this regard. Also I don’t think that there’s much that conference organisers can or should do about such things.

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Syndicated 2015-01-08 12:02:52 from etbe - Russell Coker

DNSSEC

reason=”verification failed; insecure key”

I’ve recently noticed OpenDKIM on systems I run giving the above message when trying to verify a DKIM message from my own domain. According to Google searches this is due to DNSSEC not being enabled. I’m not certain that I really need DNSSEC for this reason (I can probably make DKIM work without it), but the lack of it does decrease the utility of DKIM and DNSSEC is generally a good thing to have.

Client (Recursive) Configuration

The Debian Wiki page about DNSSEC is really good for setting up recursive resolvers [1]. Basically if you install the bind9 package on Debian/Wheezy (current stable) it will work by default. If you have upgraded from an older release then it might not work (IE if you modified the BIND configuration and didn’t allow the upgrade to overwrite your changes). The Debian Wiki page is also quite useful if you aren’t using Debian, most of it is more Linux specific than Debian specific.

dig +short test.dnssec-or-not.net TXT | tail -1

After you have enabled DNSSEC on a recursive resolver the above command should return “Yes, you are using DNSSEC“.

dig +noall +comments dnssec-failed.org

The above command queries a zone that’s deliberately misconfigured, it will fail if DNSSEC is working correctly.

Signing a Zone

Digital Ocean has a reasonable tutorial on signing a zone [2].

dnssec-keygen -a NSEC3RSASHA1 -b 2048 -n ZONE example.com

The above command creates a Zone Signing Key.

dnssec-keygen -f KSK -a NSEC3RSASHA1 -b 4096 -n ZONE example.com

The above command creates a Key Signing Key. This will take a very long time if you don’t have a good entropy source, on my systems it took a couple of days. Run this from screen or tmux.

$INCLUDE ksk/Kexample.com.+123+12345.key
$INCLUDE zsk/Kexample.com.+123+34567.key

When you have created the ZSK and KSK you need to add something like the above to your zone file to include the DNSKEY records.

all: example.com.signed

%.signed: %
        dnssec-signzone -A -3 $(shell head -c 100 /dev/random | sha1sum | cut -b 1-16) -k $(shell echo ksk/K$<*.key) -N INCREMENT -o $< -t $< $(shell echo zsk/K$<*.key)
        rndc reload

Every time you change your signed zone you need to create a new signed zone file. Above is the Makefile I’m currently using to generate the signed file. This relies on storing the KSK files in a directory named ksk/ and the ZSK files in a directory named zsk/. Then BIND needs to be configured to use example.com.signed instead of example.com.

The Registrar

Every time you sign the zone a file with a name like dsset-example.com. will be created, it will have the same contents every time which are the DS entries you send to the registrar to have your zone publicly known as being signed.

Many registrars don’t support DNSSEC, if you use such a registrar (as I do) then you need to transfer your zone before you can productively use DNSSEC. Without the DS entries being signed by a registrar and included in the TLD no-one will recognise your signatures on zone data.

ICANN has a list of registrars that support DNSSEC [3]. My next task is to move some of my domains to such registrars, unfortunately they cost more so I probably won’t transfer all my zones. Some of my zones don’t do anything that’s important enough to need DNSSEC.

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Syndicated 2015-01-02 14:08:37 from etbe - Russell Coker

wp-spamshield

Yesterday I installed the wp-spamshield plugin for WordPress [1]. It blocks automated comment spam systems by using JavaScript and cookies, apparently most spammers can’t handle that. Before I installed it I was getting hundreds of spam comments per day even with the block spam by math plugin enabled. Now I’ve had it running for 24 hours without any spam. The real advantage of this is that now when a legitimate comment gets flagged as spam I’ll notice it, previously I was deleting hundreds or thousands of comments at a time without reading them.

deb http://www.coker.com.au wheezy wordpress

The above repository has the wordpress-wp-spamshield package for Debian/Wheezy. I have no immediate plans for uploading it to Debian because the security support for WordPress plugins doesn’t fit in with the Debian model. I am prepared to negotiate about this if someone has good reasons for including it or any of the other WordPress plugins I’ve packages.

My packaging work is under the GPL (of course) so any DD who disagrees with me could just rebuild the package and upload it. Within Debian there is no rule taking another DD’s GPL’d code that they decided not to upload and then uploading it. There is a consensus that such things are not appropriate without permission, but anyone who wishes can take this blog post as permission.

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Syndicated 2014-12-23 02:20:40 from etbe - Russell Coker

BTRFS Status Dec 2014

My last problem with BTRFS was in August [1]. BTRFS has been running mostly uneventfully for me for the last 4 months, that’s a good improvement but the fact that 4 months of no problems is noteworthy for something as important as a filesystem is a cause for ongoing concern.

A RAID-1 Array

A week ago I had a minor problem with my home file server, one of the 3TB disks in the BTRFS RAID-1 started giving read errors. That’s not a big deal, I bought a new disk and did a “btrfs replace” operation which was quick and easy. The first annoyance was that the output of “btrfs device stats” reported an error count for the new device, it seems that “btrfs device replace” copies everything from the old disk including the error count. The solution is to use “btrfs device stats -z” to reset the count after replacing a device.

I replaced the 3TB disk with a 4TB disk (with current prices it doesn’t make sense to buy a new 3TB disk). As I was running low on disk space I added a 1TB disk to give it 4TB of RAID-1 capacity, one of the nice features of BTRFS is that a RAID-1 filesystem can support any combination of disks and use them to store 2 copies of every block of data. I started running a btrfs balance to get BTRFS to try and use all the space before learning from the mailing list that I should have done “btrfs filesystem resize” to make it use all the space. So my balance operation had configured the filesystem to configure itself for 2*3TB+1*1TB disks which wasn’t the right configuration when the 4TB disk was fully used. To make it even more annoying the “btrfs filesystem resize” command takes a “devid” not a device name.

I think that when BTRFS is more stable it would be good to have the btrfs utility warn the user about such potential mistakes. When a replacement device is larger than the old one it will be very common to want to use that space. The btrfs utility could easily suggest the most likely “btrfs filesystem resize” to make things easier for the user.

In a disturbing coincidence a few days after replacing the first 3TB disk the other 3TB disk started giving read errors. So I replaced the second 3TB disk with a 4TB disk and removed the 1TB disk to give a 4TB RAID-1 array. This is when it would be handy to have the metadata duplication feature and copies= option of ZFS.

Ctree Corruption

2 weeks ago a basic workstation with a 120G SSD owned by a relative stopped booting, the most significant errors it gave were “BTRFS: log replay required on RO media” and “BTRFS: open_ctree failed”. The solution to this is to run the command “btrfs-zero-log”, but that initially didn’t work. I restored the system from a backup (which was 2 months old) and took the SSD home to work on it. A day later “btrfs-zero-log” worked correctly and I recovered all the data. Note that I didn’t even try mounting the filesystem in question read-write, I mounted it read-only to copy all the data off. While in theory the filesystem should have been OK I didn’t have a need to keep using it at that time (having already wiped the original device and restored from backup) and I don’t have confidence in BTRFS working correctly in that situation.

While it was nice to get all the data back it’s a concern when commands don’t operate consistently.

Debian and BTRFS

I was concerned when the Debian kernel team chose 3.16 as the kernel for Jessie (the next Debian release). Judging by the way development has been going I wasn’t confident that 3.16 would turn out to be stable enough for BTRFS. But 3.16 is working reasonably well on a number of systems so it seems that it’s likely to work well in practice.

But I’m still deploying more ZFS servers.

The Value of Anecdotal Evidence

When evaluating software based on reports from reliable sources (IE most readers will trust me to run systems well and only report genuine bugs) bad reports have a much higher weight than good reports. The fact that I’ve seen kernel 3.16 to work reasonably well on ~6 systems is nice but that doesn’t mean it will work well on thousands of other systems – although it does indicate that it will work well on more systems than some earlier Linux kernels which had common BTRFS failures.

But the annoyances I had with the 3TB array are repeatable and will annoy many other people. The ctree coruption problem MIGHT have been initially caused by a memory error (it’s a desktop machine without ECC RAM) but the recovery process was problematic and other users might expect problems in such situations.

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Syndicated 2014-12-05 08:09:27 from etbe - Russell Coker

Links October 2014

The Verge has an interesting article about Tim Cook (Apple CEO) coming out [1]. Tim says “if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy”.

Graydon2 wrote an insightful article about the right-wing libertarian sock-puppets of silicon valley [2].

George Monbiot wrote an insightful article for The Guardian about the way that double-speak facilitates killing people [3]. He is correct that the media should hold government accountable for such use of language instead of perpetuating it.

Anne Thériault wrote an insightful article for Vice about the presumption of innocence and sex crimes [4].

Dr Nerdlove wrote an interesting article about Gamergate as the “extinction burst” of “gamer culture” [5], we can only hope.

Shweta Narayan wrote an insightful article about Category Structure and Oppression [6]. I can’t summarise it because it’s a complex concept, read the article.

Some Debian users who don’t like Systemd have started a “Debian Fork” project [7], which so far just has a web site and nothing else. I expect that they will never write any code. But it would be good if they did, they would learn about how an OS works and maybe they wouldn’t disagree so much with the people who have experience in developing system software.

A GamerGate terrorist in Utah forces Anita Sarkeesian to cancel a lecture [8]. I expect that the reaction will be different when (not if) an Islamic group tries to get a lecture cancelled in a similar manner.

Model View Culture has an insightful article by Erika Lynn Abigail about Autistics in Silicon Valley [9].

Katie McDonough wrote an interesting article for Salon about Ed Champion and what to do about men who abuse women [10]. It’s worth reading that while thinking about the FOSS community…

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Syndicated 2014-10-31 13:55:52 from etbe - Russell Coker

Samsung Galaxy Note 3

In June last year I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 [1]. Generally I was very happy with that phone, one problem I had is that less than a year after purchasing it the Ingress menus burned into the screen [2].

2 weeks ago I bought a new Galaxy Note 3. One of the reasons for getting it is the higher resolution screen, I never realised the benefits of a 1920*1080 screen on a phone until my wife got a Nexus 5 [3]. I had been idly considering a Galaxy Note 4, but $1000 is a lot of money to pay for a phone and I’m not sure that a 2560*1440 screen will offer much benefit in that size. Also the Note 3 and Note 4 both have 3G of RAM, as some applications use more RAM when you have a higher resolution screen the Note 4 will effectively have less usable RAM than the Note 3.

My first laptop cost me $3,800 in 1998, that’s probably more than $6,000 in today’s money. The benefits that I receive now from an Android phone are in many ways greater than I received from that laptop and that laptop was definitely good value for money for me. If the cheapest Android phone cost $6,000 then I’d pay that, but given that the Note 3 is only $550 (including postage) there’s no reason for me to buy something more expensive.

Another reason for getting a new phone is the limited storage space in the Note 2. 16G of internal storage is a limit when you have some big games installed. Also the recent Android update which prevented apps from writing to the SD card meant that it was no longer convenient to put TV shows on my SD card. 32G of internal storage in the Note 3 allows me to fit everything I want (including the music video collection I downloaded with youtube-dl). The Note 2 has 16G of internal storage and an 8G SD card (that I couldn’t fully use due to Android limitations) while the Note 3 has 32G (the 64G version wasn’t on sale at any of the cheap online stores). Also the Note 3 supports an SD card which will be good for my music video collection at some future time, this is a significant benefit over the Nexus 5.

In the past I’ve written about Android service life and concluded that storage is the main issue [4]. So it is a bit unfortunate that I couldn’t get a phone with 64G of storage at a reasonable price. But the upside is that getting a cheaper phone allows me to buy another one sooner and give the old phone to a relative who has less demanding requirements.

In the past I wrote about the warranty support for my wife’s Nexus 5 [5]. I should have followed up on that before, 3 days after that post we received a replacement phone. One good thing that Google does is to reserve money on a credit card to buy the new phone and then send you the new phone before you send the old one back. So if the customer doesn’t end up sending the broken phone they just get billed for the new phone, that avoids excessive delays in getting a replacement phone. So overall the process of Google warranty support is really good, if 2 products are equal in other ways then it would be best to buy from Google to get that level of support.

I considered getting a Nexus 5 as the hardware is reasonably good (not the greatest but quite good enough) and the price is also reasonably good. But one thing I really hate is the way they do the buttons. Having the home button appear on the main part of the display is really annoying. I much prefer the Samsung approach of having a hardware button for home and touch-screen buttons outside the viewable area for settings and back. Also the stylus on the Note devices is convenient on occasion.

The Note 3 has a fake-leather back. The concept of making fake leather is tacky, I believe that it’s much better to make honest plastic that doesn’t pretend to be something that it isn’t. However the texture of the back improves the grip. Also the fake stitches around the edge help with the grip too. It’s tacky but utilitarian.

The Note 3 is slightly smaller and lighter than the Note 2. This is a good technical achievement, but I’d rather they just gave it a bigger battery.

Update USB 3

One thing I initially forgot to mention is that the Note 3 has USB 3. This means that it has a larger socket which is less convenient when you try and plug it in at night. USB 3 seems unlikely to provide any benefit for me as I’ve never had any of my other phones transfer data at rates more than about 5MB/s. If the Note 3 happens to have storage that can handle speeds greater than the 32MB/s a typical USB 2 storage device can handle then I’m still not going to gain much benefit. USB 2 speeds would allow me to transfer the entire contents of a Note 3 in less than 20 minutes (if I needed to copy the entire storage contents). I can’t imagine myself having a real-world benefit from that.

The larger socket means more fumbling when charging my phone at night and it also means that the Note 3 cable can’t be used in any other phone I own. In a year or two my wife will have a phone with USB 3 support and that cable can be used for charging 2 phones. But at the moment the USB 3 cable isn’t useful as I don’t need to have a phone charger that can only charge one phone.

Conclusion

The Note 3 basically does everything I expected of it. It’s just like the Note 2 but a bit faster and with more storage. I’m happy with it.

Related posts:

  1. Samsung Galaxy Note 2 A few weeks ago I bought a new Samsung Galaxy...
  2. Samsung Galaxy S3 First Review with Power Case My new Samsung Galaxy S3 arrived a couple of days...
  3. Samsung Galaxy Camera – a Quick Review I recently had a chance to briefly play with the...

Syndicated 2014-10-31 13:40:25 from etbe - Russell Coker

Samsung Galaxy Note 3

In June last year I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 [1]. Generally I was very happy with that phone, one problem I had is that less than a year after purchasing it the Ingress menus burned into the screen [2].

2 weeks ago I bought a new Galaxy Note 3. One of the reasons for getting it is the higher resolution screen, I never realised the benefits of a 1920*1080 screen on a phone until my wife got a Nexus 5 [3]. I had been idly considering a Galaxy Note 4, but $1000 is a lot of money to pay for a phone and I’m not sure that a 2560*1440 screen will offer much benefit in that size. Also the Note 3 and Note 4 both have 3G of RAM, as some applications use more RAM when you have a higher resolution screen the Note 4 will effectively have less usable RAM than the Note 3.

My first laptop cost me $3,800 in 1998, that’s probably more than $6,000 in today’s money. The benefits that I receive now from an Android phone are in many ways greater than I received from that laptop and that laptop was definitely good value for money for me. If the cheapest Android phone cost $6,000 then I’d pay that, but given that the Note 3 is only $550 (including postage) there’s no reason for me to buy something more expensive.

Another reason for getting a new phone is the limited storage space in the Note 2. 16G of internal storage is a limit when you have some big games installed. Also the recent Android update which prevented apps from writing to the SD card meant that it was no longer convenient to put TV shows on my SD card. 32G of internal storage in the Note 3 allows me to fit everything I want (including the music video collection I downloaded with youtube-dl). The Note 2 has 16G of internal storage and an 8G SD card (that I couldn’t fully use due to Android limitations) while the Note 3 has 32G (the 64G version wasn’t on sale at any of the cheap online stores). Also the Note 3 supports an SD card which will be good for my music video collection at some future time, this is a significant benefit over the Nexus 5.

In the past I’ve written about Android service life and concluded that storage is the main issue [4]. So it is a bit unfortunate that I couldn’t get a phone with 64G of storage at a reasonable price. But the upside is that getting a cheaper phone allows me to buy another one sooner and give the old phone to a relative who has less demanding requirements.

In the past I wrote about the warranty support for my wife’s Nexus 5 [5]. I should have followed up on that before, 3 days after that post we received a replacement phone. One good thing that Google does is to reserve money on a credit card to buy the new phone and then send you the new phone before you send the old one back. So if the customer doesn’t end up sending the broken phone they just get billed for the new phone, that avoids excessive delays in getting a replacement phone. So overall the process of Google warranty support is really good, if 2 products are equal in other ways then it would be best to buy from Google to get that level of support.

I considered getting a Nexus 5 as the hardware is reasonably good (not the greatest but quite good enough) and the price is also reasonably good. But one thing I really hate is the way they do the buttons. Having the home button appear on the main part of the display is really annoying. I much prefer the Samsung approach of having a hardware button for home and touch-screen buttons outside the viewable area for settings and back. Also the stylus on the Note devices is convenient on occasion.

The Note 3 has a fake-leather back. The concept of making fake leather is tacky, I believe that it’s much better to make honest plastic that doesn’t pretend to be something that it isn’t. However the texture of the back improves the grip. Also the fake stitches around the edge help with the grip too. It’s tacky but utilitarian.

The Note 3 is slightly smaller and lighter than the Note 2. This is a good technical achievement, but I’d rather they just gave it a bigger battery.

Conclusion

The Note 3 basically does everything I expected of it. It’s just like the Note 2 but a bit faster and with more storage. I’m happy with it.

Related posts:

  1. Samsung Galaxy Note 2 A few weeks ago I bought a new Samsung Galaxy...
  2. Samsung Galaxy S3 First Review with Power Case My new Samsung Galaxy S3 arrived a couple of days...
  3. Samsung Galaxy Camera – a Quick Review I recently had a chance to briefly play with the...

Syndicated 2014-10-31 12:55:25 from etbe - Russell Coker

Links September 2014

Matt Palmer wrote a short but informative post about enabling DNS in a zone [1]. I really should setup DNSSEC on my own zones.

Paul Wayper has some insightful comments about the Liberal party’s nasty policies towards the unemployed [2]. We really need a Basic Income in Australia.

Joseph Heath wrote an interesting and insightful article about the decline of the democratic process [3]. While most of his points are really good I’m dubious of his claims about twitter. When used skillfully twitter can provide short insights into topics and teasers for linked articles.

Sarah O wrote an insightful article about NotAllMen/YesAllWomen [4]. I can’t summarise it well in a paragraph, I recommend reading it all.

Betsy Haibel wrote an informative article about harassment by proxy on the Internet [5]. Everyone should learn about this before getting involved in discussions about “controversial” issues.

George Monbiot wrote an insightful and interesting article about the referendum for Scottish independence and the failures of the media [6].

Mychal Denzel Smith wrote an insightful article “How to know that you hate women” [7].

Sam Byford wrote an informative article about Google’s plans to develop and promote cheap Android phones for developing countries [8]. That’s a good investment in future market share by Google and good for the spread of knowledge among people all around the world. I hope that this research also leads to cheap and reliable Android devices for poor people in first-world countries.

Deb Chachra wrote an insightful and disturbing article about the culture of non-consent in the IT industry [9]. This is something we need to fix.

David Hill wrote an interesting and informative article about the way that computer game journalism works and how it relates to GamerGate [10].

Anita Sarkeesian shares the most radical thing that you can do to support women online [11]. Wow, the world sucks more badly than I realised.

Michael Daly wrote an article about the latest evil from the NRA [12]. The NRA continues to demonstrate that claims about “good people with guns” are lies, the NRA are evil people with guns.

Related posts:

  1. Links July 2014 Dave Johnson wrote an interesting article for Salon about companies...
  2. Links May 2014 Charmian Gooch gave an interesting TED talk about her efforts...
  3. Links September 2013 Matt Palmer wrote an insightful post about the use of...

Syndicated 2014-09-30 13:55:48 from etbe - Russell Coker

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