I decided to go all SSD in my T5610 as I could use the speed and wanted to get rid of the extra SATA cables, power splitters, 5.25" caddy, hard disk and an old SSD running on SATA2 etc; it also will pave the way for adding an NVMe when the prices fall a bit, and passing through an SSD to KVM for nested ESXi, although I found it doesn’t speed up a SUSE install at all over qcow2.

I’ve been having another go at learning to wire up ethernet cable, specifically CAT6 cable. I’d previously tried CAT5 years ago and gave up as I was useless at it. Well turns out one of my line testers was knackered, so maybe I wasn’t so bad at it after all?! Also I found this video which shows how to unwind the conductors using the spare bit of sheath that you’ve just removed - it really does the job and saves your poor fingers:

Well I’ve converted my blog from wordpress to static, so no more mysql/php on this server, just markdown. I must get around to adding some new content, not actually posted for over 2 years! I’ve been doing lots of stuff with QEMU/KVM and even some ESXi (yuk!) and not using VirtualBox anymore. See my github for various libvirt scripts including VFIO with macOS/Win10, AutoYast with SUSE, kickstart for RedHat, preseed for Debian, virt-builder for Fedora, nested ESXi; and also how to configure your host.

I’ve been experimenting with using non-standard pins on an ATtiny85. Using XTAL1 and XTAL2 is simple if you run off the internal oscillator at 8MHz/3.3v but I want to also use the RESET pin as D5/A0. When you re-purpose the RESET pin, you lose the ability to program using an ISP, so we have to use a high voltage serial programmer (HVSP) which basically applies 12v to the RESET pin to set the fuses.

I decided I wanted to play with shift registers, and the classic circuit for that is running a bunch more LED’s from a chip than the chip has pins, so I decided on an 8 pin ATtiny85 running 16 LED’s as a Larson scanner (Knight Rider or Cylon effect). I started out on breadboard which was a terrible mistake as I ended up needing two breadboards to provide enough space to run 16 LED’s via resistors all with a shared GND.