I've got defederated from the power grid yesterday. Again! For the fifth time in a week or so 
Unfortunately this time was different — tiny ARM machine I am using as VPN box/proxy started having issues with built-in storage, it looks odd as I can even write to it, but after I've read about 3 gigabytes, the controller goes nuts, kernel log gets littered with messages like "Oh noes, we don't support UltraDMA anymore" — after that I can't even read anything from it.
Maybe it wasn't the outage, this machine is over 15 years old and might start showing its age, especially its storage.
Fortunately for me, unlike machines of this kind of today, Efika MX NetTop turned out very serviceable. It looks like the controller is located on the same daughter board as the flash chips. Got the ribbon cable re-seated — didn't help, the connector it gets plugged into is labelled 99FLB (fscking logic board?
). These machines are supposed to have eMMC for SSD — and it's likely what this interface is, shouldn't be something custom, but I don't know much about this stuff. Does this look familiar to anyone? Maybe I can just replace the whole board and be done with it.
I still need a dedicated VPN box/proxy as I don't want to use VPN on every individual device in my home and I don't want it on router either as I have a few things hosted like my Plenormer instance and those have to respond from my "real" external IP.
It already had very few moving parts on the root partition, its /var was on a separate SD card. I suspect that this problem started showing even earlier, but I didn't pay attention — it boots and works even in its current state. Anyway, I have moved the rest of volatile/mutable dirs to SD card and it works for now, but it might just bork at unpredictable moment so I will have to reboot it, but I might not even be at home when this happens, I'd really like to have a more proper, reliable fix for it.
Unfortunately this time was different — tiny ARM machine I am using as VPN box/proxy started having issues with built-in storage, it looks odd as I can even write to it, but after I've read about 3 gigabytes, the controller goes nuts, kernel log gets littered with messages like "Oh noes, we don't support UltraDMA anymore" — after that I can't even read anything from it.
Maybe it wasn't the outage, this machine is over 15 years old and might start showing its age, especially its storage.
Fortunately for me, unlike machines of this kind of today, Efika MX NetTop turned out very serviceable. It looks like the controller is located on the same daughter board as the flash chips. Got the ribbon cable re-seated — didn't help, the connector it gets plugged into is labelled 99FLB (fscking logic board?
). These machines are supposed to have eMMC for SSD — and it's likely what this interface is, shouldn't be something custom, but I don't know much about this stuff. Does this look familiar to anyone? Maybe I can just replace the whole board and be done with it.I still need a dedicated VPN box/proxy as I don't want to use VPN on every individual device in my home and I don't want it on router either as I have a few things hosted like my Plenormer instance and those have to respond from my "real" external IP.
It already had very few moving parts on the root partition, its /var was on a separate SD card. I suspect that this problem started showing even earlier, but I didn't pay attention — it boots and works even in its current state. Anyway, I have moved the rest of volatile/mutable dirs to SD card and it works for now, but it might just bork at unpredictable moment so I will have to reboot it, but I might not even be at home when this happens, I'd really like to have a more proper, reliable fix for it.
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So it seems, this connector is called PATA ZIF and it was pretty common long time ago and was used in some laptops. Unfortunately they are extremely rare nowadays, what I see sold online is mostly converters — which is okay, but I will still need some drive to put into it, or boards/modules like this one, but mostly used 😩
