2.5 Admins 229: LiFePo4Life
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Two and a half admins, episode 229. I'm Joe. I'm Jim. And I'm Alan. And here we are again. Jim, you recently had something of revelation about UPSs. I did. I went shopping for power banks because we had a hurricane hit the southeastern United States where I live, and I was without power for close to 10 days. And I was like, oh, I'm going to buy a power bank.

And one of the things that made that more bearable was having a big thousand volt amp Jackery power bank and having a pretty nice little, you know, anchor power bank that I fly with that I can, you know, fast recharge my phones and tablets. And one of the things that I had not realized until I bought that power bank was just how much more rapidly things could be charged. Now we've, we've talked about that before and,

But anyway, we wound up a lot of what really kind of got us through that week with no power was taking the Jackery and my smaller Anker power bank to other places that did have power, charging them up relatively quickly and then bringing them home to power things. I was like, you know, this is actually in a lot of ways, this is kind of better than having to deal with like a whole home generator setup. It's certainly a heck of a lot cheaper and, you know, it's kind of more flexible. So anyway, this is kind of a lot of work.

This isn't supposed to be the point. The point is I went shopping for more power banks, and what I discovered was that Anker is now selling a line of power banks that have switching functionality. They can detect when wall power coming in cuts out, and they can turn on AC outlets to provide uninterrupted power to the devices that are plugged in. That sounds like a UPS to me. Exactly.

Exactly. But, you know, with a lithium phosphate battery instead of lead acid, so they're much smaller, much lighter and have dramatically longer runtime. And lifetime overall. Yes, yes. Much greater lifetime overall. Lead acid UPSs, they generally don't, they're not going to last full functionality for more than maybe two years. The outside at that point, the runtime starts plummeting really quickly down to nothing. And the runtime didn't start out that great to begin with.

Typically, if you're plugging in a reasonably powerful computer and a couple of monitors into one of the quote big unquote 1500 volt amp desktop UPSs, if you're very lucky when it's brand new, you might get about half an hour worth of runtime. And

And essentially the little Anker C300, which was the first model that I bought, the prices fluctuate a lot right now, you know, between Christmas deals and this and that and the other. But basically you'll be able to get one for 250 bucks or less. Right now it's considerably less.

And that doesn't compare that unfavorably with the price of a 1500 volt amp APC or cyber power UPS. But although the power handling is a lot lower, the 300 and anchor solex 300 refers to 300 watts continuous power handling.

That's enough to power a pretty substantial amount of computing equipment. And the runtime, while the power handling is, you know, 20% of what was claimed on the 1500 volt amp UPS, give or take, the runtime is almost four times as much as you get out of the lead acid one.

And where the lead-acid one is only going to last a couple of years, could be less depending on, you know, how many times it's discharged and recharged. The lithium phosphate chemistry, it should last you for a decade to 20 years pretty easily, even if that means more than a thousand full discharge and recharge cycles. You can't do that with lead-acid. And so you've done various testing of this. Have you put them into production then?

I have a couple of them. Definitely, I've done more testing on the Ankers than anything else. The Solux line, that is definitely what I would recommend to anybody who wants to get into this stuff right now. There are a lot of different brands. Alan and I have both tried stuff from an outfit called Blutty or Bluetti. We didn't like the Bluetti as much as we like Anker. And I also tried something on you can find on Amazon right now called Golden Mate.

The Golden Mate device looks a lot more like a traditional desktop UPS. It's also specced out a lot more like a traditional desktop UPS with 1000 volt amps power handling, although it looks to be roughly the same actual runtime as the little Anker Solix C300, just with a much heavier duty circuitry attached to it, apparently. I haven't gotten through a full run flat test on the Golden Mate device yet, and I don't see it becoming my device of choice.

because the display on it is very primitive. All it shows you is, you know, like four bars on a battery icon. You don't get like an actual percentage of battery life remaining, much less estimated runtime remaining, whereas the Anker gives you both of those things. Also gives you Bluetooth connectivity if you want to manage it directly from a cell phone app. Via the Bluetooth app, you can connect it to Wi-Fi so that you can, you know, connect to it directly over your LAN or your wireless LAN.

which that in turn should open up possibilities, although neither Alan nor I have gotten to that phase yet, that should open up possibilities to do, you know, more of the standard type of automation you'd expect with that kind of communication interface with a traditional UPS, like setting something up to automatically shut down connected hardware, you know, all that kind of thing. Now, that's not something you can easily do right out of the box. I don't want anybody to misunderstand. What we're saying is,

If you've got a tinkering mindset and a burning desire, you absolutely should be able to do that for yourself as a project. Yeah, I think the thing that attracted me most to these was the fact that the lithium iron phosphate batteries are going to last like 10 years, whereas my current UPS is I'm replacing the battery at least every two years. And the battery is like 80% of the cost of the machine. And these are

Anker and BlueEddy and so on devices are in mostly the same price range, maybe a little bit more, but knowing that they're going to last five times as long and they have that much more runtime as well means it really starts to not make sense to deal with the traditional UPS. I think my biggest complaint so far with the BlueEddy is the switch over time is not as fast as the UPS, although the computer didn't seem to mind.

It was interesting to plug the UPS into the BlueEddy and then when it switches over, you can hear the UPS take over for a split second, but then be like, oh no, the line voltage is fine.

But, you know, it was a fraction of a second there where it was enough for the UPS to detect the power was lost. But when the computer running off of it didn't really notice. But my biggest problem with the Blue Eddy was that basically when drawing 80 or 90 watts through it of the 300 or 500 that the model I had could do, the fan basically came on constantly. So when I first plugged it in, the fan came on a bit. I'm like, it's charging. That makes sense. Then when it was 100% charged, the fan goes off.

I plugged the computer into it, just bypassing, not actually really using the battery. And the fan comes on and I realized that, yeah, the fan's now running 24 seven. It ran all night and never actually clicked off once. I'm like, okay, that is maybe a little problematic.

I understand why. Basically, it's using its inverter, taking the 120 volts out of the wall, converting it to DC, and then converting it back to AC to feed it into my computer. And we'll be able to switch over to pulling DC from the battery if it needs to. But it doesn't. But it means that that inverter is getting warm, even running at 100 watts, and causes it to

run this fan all the time. So instead of replacing the UPS at my desk where I'm sitting right now recording the show, it is running in my laundry room backing up the core of my network, my POE switch and my Wi-Fi and my cable modem and my DSL modem and so on. And it works quite well there. I did have to use the Bluetooth app and convince it to stop turning off its DC power for the

USB ports that are running my little Ripe Atlas connection monitoring tool and another little device that are plugged in over USB to the front of the BlueEddy device and basically tell it that, you know, even

Even though there's only like 0.5 watts being drawn, keep the inverter on and don't turn it off. That's a load-bearing half a watt. Yeah. In this case, this is monitoring my internet connections to make sure they're working and earning me points I can use to monitor the rest of the internet. But other than the fan, it was kind of okay. But I like the Anker software better and just the build quality seems to be nicer and the control...

and so on. In my testing, even just the vampire power draw from a powered off LED monitor was enough to make the BlueWeddy turn its fans on once an hour, every hour for, you know, a couple of minutes. And, you know,

The fans, they're not like super loud and obnoxious, but they're definitely loud enough that, you know, you're like, why did this fan just kick on, you know, 10 feet behind my head? And it just, no, don't like it. Do not like it. For me personally, I would be able to tolerate that in a server room, but, you know, attached to somebody's workstation, it would drive me bananas and I wouldn't subject a client to that. I don't have any such drawback with the Anker.

The Anker Solix stuff, I'd never hear a fan come on at all with those things unless you're discharging serious amounts of power. If you're discharging a few hundred watts, then yeah, a fan will kick on while you're doing that. But you're not talking about while you're running off of wall power. You're talking about while it's actually on the battery and if it's

consuming a significant amount of that battery's power, it turns on a fan. I don't have an issue with that. My normal UPS does that. Yeah, it's just the constant never-ending, now we have introduced another mechanical thing to randomly spin up and down and, you know, make your life a little more chaotic. No thank you, I'm good. Yeah, on top of the fact that Joe would murder me if I kept a noisy fan running in this room all the time while recording...

I believe the battery will last 10 years. I don't believe that fan will last 10 years. And if it dies, does the unit self-protect and shut off? Or does it just stop working? Or does it overheat? Or what? So if the fan's only used occasionally, that'll be fine. But if the fan's basically going to be running 24-7, then it's probably going to limit the lifetime of the device. Now, the Anker one you mentioned, Jim, the Solix C300, there is a DC version, which is slightly cheaper. So you don't want to accidentally buy that one. Yeah, correct. Yeah.

You do want to be careful if that's what you're buying this for. If you want it as a UPS, by all means, make sure you get the one that actually has AC outlets on it because there is a slightly cheaper version that is nothing but a USB power bank. It cannot do AC power at all. Yeah.

Yeah, which has a use, but just not this particular use case. Yeah. The other thing I'll say about the reasons that I so strongly prefer the Anchor stuff, like I said, I like the metrics that it offers. The connectivity is good. The form factor is good. Anchor in general is just a really well-known, well-respected provider of high quality for a reasonable cost parts, which is just nice to feel like I'm in a solid ecosystem. Yeah.

Moving on, this can be viewed now as a much more multipurpose device. If the power goes out, it may suddenly become more important to you than you thought that every one of your UPSs has a built-in trouble light. And literally all you have to do is tap a button and get four different brightnesses from the built-in trouble light on the UPS.

That can be real handy in some random server closet somewhere, whether it be, you know, in your own home lab or, you know, in a small business somewhere that maybe doesn't have all the niceties that you would typically find in an enterprise. That's randomly reminding me of once when the power was out here for eight hours or so.

decided to just take the opportunity to redo the cabling in my rack so it was nicer since all the machines were off anyway. And having to light the room with a bunch of toy lightsabers. The other thing I've been looking at is Anker makes a big boy of this, the Solix F3800. And that's 3,800 watts. It's basically like a suitcase-sized thing.

And it has UPS functionality, although there's some limitations. If you plug it into the wall and you're getting the normal like US Canada standard 120 volts, only the I think left side power plugs are available. All the right side ones don't work and all the 240 volt plugs don't work. But that makes sense because you're only fitting 120 volts from the wall. So the inverter is only powered on one half, not the other half. And it obviously can't make 240 volts out of that.

But they do sell a thing where you can gang two of them together and get the 240 volt stuff. Or they sell this thing called the home power panel that lets you take two of these and basically jack them into your backup panel, a phony panel that feeds into your main power grid and be able to power your whole house with them if you wanted. I've not quite gone that far, but...

Very soon, my Eaton 6000 volt amp UPS that powers the rack in my server room in my basement is going to hit the end of its battery life.

And I'm leaning pretty far towards going lithium phosphate battery rather than lead acid in the future. And I don't know if these anchor units seem to be in the lead for my Christmas list. I'm looking on Amazon now, £2,700 for one of them. Yeah, it's on sale for US$2,600 on the US site right now. Right, and that's competitive with what you're replacing then? Yeah, I think the thing I replaced it with was $6,000. Right. Without the added extra battery.

Now, that has faster cutover times and maybe a little bit more conditioning and a bunch of other things. My biggest holdup right now is that I need 240 volt power for all. Well, I don't actually need 240 volt, but it'd be more efficient to do 240 volt. And that's how the rack's already configured. But they do sell dual systems of these Anker Solexes and the expansion batteries and the things that hook up your solar to it and all kinds of... There's a whole ecosystem here, not just an individual system.

suitcase battery. And honestly, 20 millisecond switchover is fine. It's too quick to see the difference in an incandescent light bulb powered off the circuit. It's too fast to see if you're watching it with an oscilloscope, which I know because I tested the output waveforms of all these things with my handy dandy oscilloscope and literally watched the switchover. It's not really something that you need to worry about.

Honestly, if you had equipment that you really needed to worry about how clean the power was to that degree, you should have that equipment behind a line conditioner of its own regardless of the UPS because it's just – you need more than what's being offered here.

Yeah, and like I've seen people do reviews of the Anker where, you know, they plug the computer into it and then start like video transcoding or something that's going to be heavy and probably notice a power interruption and then pull the power and the switchover is fast enough that, you know, the monitor doesn't blink. The video encoding doesn't get interrupted. The computer really doesn't notice.

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A few months ago, I brought up something of a philosophical question. And that was, I took a photo of a cat and I wondered how long that photo would exist. And we kind of got into having to look after the backups of it and everything. But that kind of led me down another path. And that was a question of, is it possible to completely delete something?

And what got me thinking about that was another photo I took of my friend who did not like that photo and asked me to delete it. And so I did. I deleted it from my phone and from all my backups, I thought. And then a few months later, in a backup that I'd forgotten about, sure enough, there's that photo. And it made me think, if I wanted to delete a photo now or any kind of file, it'd be in a bunch of ZFS snapshots that are backed up all over the place and

And it would be really quite difficult for me to delete every trace of a file. And so there's the question, is it possible to completely delete something these days? And what if it's gone out onto the internet? Surely at that point, it's not possible because who knows who's copied it to wherever. Like this podcast, once this goes out,

Is it ever going to be possible to delete it? Not on purpose. We actually have to restate the question a little bit. Of course, it's always possible to delete something. The real question is, is it possible to be certain that you have deleted something? And that's a very different answer, which is no, especially once it has left your control.

I don't care what kind of protections and safeguards and whatever else you larded on top of it. Once you've given somebody else access to it, you don't know what they've done with it. You no longer have control over it. You can't be certain you can get rid of it.

This is something that Hollywood has demonstrated should have been to everybody's satisfaction by now as they have tried, you know, scheme after scheme after scheme of digital rights management that is supposed to allow them to do exactly what you're asking for. To be certain that if they don't want you to have a copy of their movie, then, you know, you won't be able to have it and they can get rid of it. And as we all know, the answer is no.

Even Hollywood can't make that happen because once you allow somebody to view that content, you don't know that they won't take some technological measure to back up that content without your rights management in it because they don't actually care about your rights management. They don't actually want to replicate your rights management. They want to replicate the content. And if you let them have access to the content,

It's out of your control. Yeah. Like even if you can delete the original picture, you're going to have the problem of did somebody take a screenshot of the picture when they had access to it and things like that.

So there are steps you can kind of take ahead of time if you know something like this. Like if you're going to back stuff up to a cloud provider or whatever, if you encrypt it first, then you know that if you can destroy the encryption key and no one else ever had the decryption key, that while you can't be sure that Amazon has destroyed all copies of your data once you stop paying them for it or something, you can be sure they won't be able to decrypt it without your decryption key. But that's not...

as selective as you might want if you want to be able to delete that photo and not everything. Again, to Joe's example of that photo's in some ZFS snapshot and you can't delete one file from that snapshot. You'd have to just delete the entire snapshot. And that's not always practical if you still want the rest of your backup.

I think even more importantly is the problem that, you know, in your example where you're encrypting your backups and you're not sharing the key to that encryption with the target for the backup,

I would argue that logically speaking, you haven't actually shared that content with that storage provider at all. You've leveraged their resources, but because you never gave them the key, you never gave them the content. And that's the only reason you can be certain that you can destroy it from their perspective. Yeah, you just gave them garbled data, essentially. Exactly. But that's why the minute you say, no, I actually want somebody else to be able to see this,

you're done. It's game over because at that point you don't know what they've done with it. So we could re-implement, we could talk through right here. We could noodle through over the next half an hour, how to gin up an entirely new digital rights management system where you embed a key into like all the photos that you share with people and they can't actually decrypt the photo to look at it unless they have access to the key that you used for that. And you have like this key sharing and management system so you can revoke the key and then nobody will be look at it. But again,

In the meantime, people are just going to be right-clicking and saving just like they did all the stupid monkey pictures on Twitter a couple of years ago. Again, this is another example of somebody trying to do exactly what we're talking about. That's what NFTs were supposed to be. The idea was you can't copy the stupid digital monkey because the stupid digital monkey is on the blockchain and you can't change the immutable blockchain entry.

But normal humans just go, yeah, but I don't care about the blockchain crap. I just right click and save as and boom. Now I have the stupid monkey too. Yeah, I don't care about that specific copy of the stupid monkey. I just want a copy of the stupid monkey. Yeah, and you talked about the screenshot thing as well. Like it's not going to be quite as good quality or whatever, but it's still essentially the same image. Right. It's generally the problem with any kind of secret disappearing chat or anything like that that tries to solve this problem is that

oh, even if the app disables you from taking a screenshot, you can usually override that. And if not, I'll just take a picture of my phone with another phone. Yeah. Or say you have some digital audio that you're streaming to me and that's digital rights management on it.

I can just plug a headphone jack in or a dongle or whatever and take an analog recording of that and then re-encode it. Yeah, it's not going to be quite the same quality, but I'm still going to be able to listen to that audio book or that song or whatever. And there are always better, lower noise ways to work around the DRM stuff. This is basically just the point of like,

even without any technical sophistication, whatever, even just at the stone axe simplicity level, yeah, you can copy that. 13-year-olds using Snapchat have long since figured out that, yeah, you take another phone and you take video of the phone that's playing the Snapchat stream that the person who's doing something inadvisable is banking on Snapchat having deleted within 24 hours before they go back to school. And

No, now it turns out that, you know, just the kid aiming one phone at another phone like that quality was good enough that, well, everybody at school is still going to see that thing you did on that Snapchat stream and you're still going to regret it. And you're still not going to enjoy conversations you're having with parents and teachers. Yeah. And how many times have we seen CCTV footage just recorded off a monitor? You might not have access to get the digital file, but if you've got a phone and you can see the screen, then you can record the event that took place. Absolutely. Yeah.

So what about deleting just from your own backups? Is it just because my backups are not organized enough that I manage to miss a copy of it? You're an agent of chaos and therefore there is an element of chaos in your storage and you get chaotic results when you try to delete things. But if I asked you to delete a photo, say, or a file, let's say a text file or whatever,

that was somewhere in your backups, would you be able to do it? I mean, yes, we'd all be able to do it in theory. The trade-off would be, I would have to destroy the entire backup of all backups before that date or between the date when the file was created and the date when the file was deleted. And I might be quite unwilling to do that.

because I need the backups of every other file. So for me, the way that would work is you would be like, hey, I need you to delete that. I need to be like it never existed before.

But like, I'm just asking you this as a friend that wants this thing gone. Like there's, you know, I can't attach a monetary value to this or, you know, blah, blah, blah. My answer is going to be, okay, well, I'll delete it immediately. But I know exactly how long it will be before the last copy is gone because I'm going to let those snapshots age out my system. And as it turns out, then that means that, you know, you're going to be waiting 90 days. And I know exactly which machines it'll be on for the longest and when it will drop off.

But like Alan was saying, I'm not going to go and like wreck my backup cycle for you. You're just going to have to wait for it to age out. But I do know when it will age out and that it will age out because I

There isn't any chaos in my backup system. It's all defined by policy and scripted and automated and monitored. And I know exactly where the data goes and when. So nothing ever ends up on a flash drive or whatever randomly? I don't really use flash drives for anything other than like dropping an operating system installer on. That's just not really how I manage data. Yeah, I don't copy random files to USB drives, even hard drives and so on.

everything goes on the server and then that server gets backed up to the other server kind of thing. Like not so much for the reason to be managing the backups, but when I'm looking for a file, I know it's going to be in this exact one place. And if it's not there, then the backup is over here. Not that, oh, it's on one of seven drives somewhere on my desk. That would not make me happy. It does also depend on what the thing is you want me to delete, Joe, because if you want me to get rid of a picture that I took on my phone, um,

Now it gets a little bit more complicated and I can't necessarily guarantee that I can remove every copy of it because I do actually allow Google to back up the pictures that I take with my camera to Google Photos. And so I have allowed that data to exit my control. And I can't tell you for certain that all copies are gone or not gone because, again, that part's out of my control.

Let's do some free consulting then, but first just a quick thank you to everyone who supports us with PayPal and Patreon, we really do appreciate that. And if you want to send in your questions for Jim and Alan or your feedback, you can email show at 2.5admins.com. Martin writes, I run Linux in my office, which works great. I need to run one application on a Windows box. It connects via Bluetooth to some measuring equipment. Since I'm not a particular fan of Windows, I would like to run it in a VM.

My Ubuntu server has a Bluetooth adapter on board, which is well within Bluetooth range of the equipment. Is running Windows 11 in a VM reliable, especially the Bluetooth pass-through? Running Windows 11 in a VM will be perfectly reliable. That won't be a problem. The Bluetooth pass-through, the biggest thing is basically going to be whether you can do the pass-through or not.

Oftentimes with the ports that are built in to the device, like the USB ports and the Bluetooth and things like that, they're often part of a hybrid or multiplex device. So the way PCIe pass-through for VMs works is you can pass through an entire device from PCI into the VM. But if the onboard port and the Bluetooth controller you're using are kind of bundled as part of something, you won't be able to split it up first. So oftentimes the Bluetooth is part of the Wi-Fi chip.

And you're probably not going to want a PCI pass through the Wi-Fi from your Linux machine into the Windows VM because then you're not going to have an internet connection on your laptop or desktop machine here.

So if you can get it to pass through, then it'll probably work just fine. But for built-in devices, sometimes it's just not that practical. But there's a solution, which is getting the device you want to pass through as a separate controller card. So if you want to pass through some USB ports, you can get a little PCIe USB controller

controller card, or in this case, Bluetooth. If you get a separate Bluetooth device that plays into PCIe, you'll be able to pass that through into the VM and have it work. Whereas if it's, like I said, bundled as part of the Wi-Fi chip in your desktop machine that you're trying to do this on, it might not be possible to pass through the Bluetooth and not the Wi-Fi and so on. The other thing that's probably worth mentioning here, since you're asking specifically about running Windows 11 in a VM,

Windows 11 is a little bit more challenging to get right than Windows 10 and earlier versions were. In particular, you must use UEFI firmware, U-E-F-I. If you're virtualizing Windows 11, it will not boot off of a BIOS firmware virtual machine, which can be very frustrating and very confusing because the Windows 11 installer will boot on a BIOS firmware VM just fine, and it will go through the entire installation process

but then the virtual machine won't actually run after the installation is done. So be sure to use Eufy firmware. You will need to be sure that you are passing through a TPM of some kind to the virtual machine, whether that's a software TPM, those do work fine. You can set those up on the host machine and pass those through.

or if the host machine has a hardware TPM, that can also be passed down to VMs. But you will, at a minimum, need working TPM version 2.0 and UEFI firmware in your Windows 11 virtual machine. Why do I get the feeling that you learned that thing about the UEFI firmware, the hardware, Jim? Probably because I was still working for ours when Windows 11 came out, and the first thing I was trying to do is be one of the first people on the freaking planet to get it running in a virtual machine under KVM.

Right, well, we'd better get out of here then. Remember, show at 2.5admins.com if you want to send any questions or feedback. You can find me at joerest.com slash mastodon. You can find me at mercenariesysadmin.com. And I'm at Alan Jude. We'll see you next week.