zhongfu's inane ramblings

today's ($10) gamble: an APC Smart-UPS 750 (from the previous generation, i.e. the SUA750I)

seller says it doesn't power up no matter what they try, including "with different power cords". doesn't seem like they've tried anything else (including looking at the batteries), though

but unlike the latest generation of Smart-UPS UPSes, these ones don't have a separate SMPS for maintaining battery charge after the battery is charged up — they just use the inverter in reverse, all the time

my hunch is that the battery is completely dead, so it's got no power to even switch on the AC relays or whatever it is that it needs. pulled out the batteries, and whaddya know — they're practically bursting at the seams, and probably don't have much charge at all!

i've got a good feeling about this, so I guess all that remains is buying replacement batteries (off Taobao?) and a NMC2 (AP9630, probably). then, i'll have a(nother) perfectly serviceable network-managed UPS for $50 or so

aaaaand we're done!

WiFi faster than GbE, what a time to be alive

just dumped the flash on the thing. it's got a 2MB SPI chip, which is not amazing... honestly, I don't know if openwrt will fit on it

it probably won't, which means I can probably pack it up and just use it as-is. oh well. maybe I could pick up one of the pricier ones (e.g. the S600WP-5GT-2SX-SE), as long as i'm able to confirm that it's got a decently-sized flash

next task would probably to be set up my Chinese, 5x 2.5GbaseT + 1x SFP L2 managed PoE switch (what a mouthful)

it's a cheap workaround for the 7150-24P not having 2.5G ports, I guess, and it's going to serve 3 of my APs and 2 of my hypervisor nodes

odds are I'm gonna end up getting it done today, even if I'm not really supposed to

really stupid that I'm doing all this instead of revising for my upcoming examinations, but I feel like I've kind of checked out of academic stuff this whole week

stayed up until 8am two days ago to figure out what's a good, low-maintenance of getting past CloudFlare bot challenges (for... a personal project, involving an API stuck behind CloudFlare)

ended up writing a simple server that could spin up a limited proxy, hit up a captcha solving service (which would use the proxy, since the cookies are linked to IP), and serve the cookies to the requesting client

it was quite a fun exercise, but I... really shouldn't have been doing it. oh well?

successfully swapped out my old core switch (an ICX6450-24P) for an ICX7150-24P! went pretty uneventfully -- just configure beforehand, shift it in, move all the cables over

it seems to be a bit more finicky with the DAC (to connect to my router) though, but flipping it around seems to have worked just fine

it can run fanless (with a PoE output cap of 150W instead of 370W), but the management plane is sitting at 80.6 degrees now. that's fine, I guess, since the shutdown threshold is 105 degrees

it's not the perfect switch, but it's pretty damn near that for now. my ICX7150-48ZP would've been amazing (8 SFP+, PoH, 16x 2.5G ports), but the hellishly loud PSUs are quite the deal breaker. and it's also not cheap, so I'll have to sell it off soon

just tried to upgrade all my Proxmox nodes to 8.2, but networking completely dropped off on all of them (including AMT, for two of the nodes)

one of these days, I should really get to putting a KVM on those two, so I don't have to schlep all my other crap over to get them back up and working.

or perhaps serial? it'll be really cool if HP has serial output on boot, but i'm not holding out hope for that

well, since i've got this channel sitting here, I figured maybe it wouldn't be such a terrible idea to use this!

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Channel created