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• Adventures In NAS

  1er janvier, par Multimedia Mike — General

  In my post last year about my out-of-control single-board computer (SBC) collection which included my meager network attached storage (NAS) solution, I noted that :

  I find that a lot of my fellow nerds massively overengineer their homelab NAS setups. I’ll explore this in a future post. For my part, people tend to find my homelab NAS solution slightly underengineered.

  So here I am, exploring this is a future post. I’ve been in the home NAS game a long time, but have never had very elaborate solutions for such. For my part, I tend to take an obsessively reductionist view of what constitutes a NAS : Any small computer with a pool of storage and a network connection, running the Linux operating system and the Samba file sharing service.

  
  
  

  Many home users prefer to buy turnkey boxes, usually that allow you to install hard drives yourself, and then configure the box and its services with a friendly UI. My fellow weird computer nerds often buy cast-off enterprise hardware and set up more resilient, over-engineered solutions, as long as they have strategies to mitigate the noise and dissipate the heat, and don’t mind the electricity bills.

  If it works, awesome ! As an old hand at this, I am rather stuck in my ways, however, preferring to do my own stunts, both with the hardware and software solutions.

  My History With Home NAS Setups
  In 1998, I bought myself a new computer — beige box tower PC, as was the style as the time. This was when normal people only had one computer at most. It ran Windows, but I was curious about this new thing called “Linux” and learned to dual boot that. Later that year, it dawned on me that nothing prevented me from buying a second ugly beige box PC and running Linux exclusively on it. Further, it could be a headless Linux box, connected by ethernet, and I could consolidate files into a single place using this file sharing software named Samba.
  

  I remember it being fairly onerous to get Samba working in those days. And the internet was not quite so helpful in those days. I recall that the thing that blocked me for awhile was needing to know that I had to specify an entry for the Samba server machine in the LMHOSTS (Lanman hosts) file on the Windows 95 machine.

  However, after I cracked that code, I have pretty much always had some kind of ad-hoc home NAS setup, often combined with a headless Linux development box.

  In the early 2000s, I built a new beige box PC for a file server, with a new hard disk, and a coworker tutored me on setting up a (P)ATA UDMA 133 (or was it 150 ? anyway, it was (P)ATA’s last hurrah before SATA conquered all) expansion card and I remember profiling that the attached hard drive worked at a full 21 MBytes/s reading. It was pretty slick. Except I hadn’t really thought things through. You see, I had a hand-me-down ethernet hub cast-off from my job at the time which I wanted to use. It was a 100 Mbps repeater hub, not a switch, so the catch was that all connected machines had to be capable of 100 Mbps. So, after getting all of my machines (3 at the time) upgraded to support 10/100 ethernet (the old off-brand PowerPC running Linux was the biggest challenge), I profiled transfers and realized that the best this repeater hub could achieve was about 3.6 MBytes/s. For a long time after that, I just assumed that was the upper limit of what a 100 Mbps network could achieve. Obviously, I now know that the upper limit ought to be around 11.2 MBytes/s and if I had gamed out that fact in advance, I would have realized it didn’t make sense to care about super-fast (for the time) disk performance.

  At this time, I was doing a lot for development for MPlayer/xine/FFmpeg. I stored all of my multimedia material on this NAS. I remember being confused when I was working with Y4M data, which is raw frames, which is lots of data. xine, which employed a pre-buffering strategy, would play fine for a few seconds and then stutter. Eventually, I reasoned out that the files I was working with had a data rate about twice what my awful repeater hub supported, which is probably the first time I came to really understand and respect streaming speeds and their implications for multimedia playback.

  Smaller Solutions
  For a period, I didn’t have a NAS. Then I got an Apple AirPort Extreme, which I noticed had a USB port. So I bought a dual drive brick to plug into it and used that for a time. Later (2009), I had this thing called the MSI Wind Nettop which is the only PC I’ve ever seen that can use a CompactFlash (CF) card for a boot drive. So I did just that, and installed a large drive so it could function as a NAS, as well as a headless dev box. I’m still amazed at what a low-power I/O beast this thing is, at least when compared to all the ARM SoCs I have tried in the intervening 1.5 decades. I’ve had spinning hard drives in this thing that could read at 160 MBytes/s (‘dd’ method) and have no trouble saturating the gigabit link at 112 MBytes/s, all with its early Intel Atom CPU.

  Around 2015, I wanted a more capable headless dev box and discovered Intel’s line of NUCs. I got one of the fat models that can hold a conventional 2.5″ spinning drive in addition to the M.2 SATA SSD and I was off and running. That served me fine for a few years, until I got into the ARM SBC scene. One major limitation here is that 2.5″ drives aren’t available in nearly the capacities that make a NAS solution attractive.

  Current Solution
  My current NAS solution, chronicled in my last SBC post– the ODroid-HC2, which is a highly compact ARM SoC with an integrated USB3-SATA bridge so that a SATA drive can be connected directly to it :

  
  

  

  ODROID-HC2 NAS

  
  

  I tend to be weirdly proficient at recalling dates, so I’m surprised that I can’t recall when I ordered this and put it into service. But I’m pretty sure it was circa 2018. It’s only equipped with an 8 TB drive now, but I seem to recall that it started out with only a 4 TB drive. I think I upgraded to the 8 TB drive early in the pandemic in 2020, when ISPs were implementing temporary data cap amnesty and I was doing what a r/DataHoarder does.

  The HC2 has served me well, even though it has a number of shortcomings for a hardware set chartered for NAS :

  1. While it has a gigabit ethernet port, it’s documented that it never really exceeds about 70 MBytes/s, due to the SoC’s limitations
  2. The specific ARM chip (Samsung Exynos 5422 ; more than a decade old as of this writing) lacks cryptography instructions, slowing down encryption if that’s your thing (e.g., LUKS)
  3. While the SoC supports USB3, that block is tied up for the SATA interface ; the remaining USB port is only capable of USB2 speeds
  4. 32-bit ARM, which prevented me from running certain bits of software I wanted to try (like Minio)
  5. Only 1 drive, so no possibility for RAID (again, if that’s your thing)

  I also love to brag on the HC2’s power usage : I once profiled the unit for a month using a Kill-A-Watt and under normal usage (with the drive spinning only when in active use). The unit consumed 4.5 kWh… in an entire month.

  New Solution
  Enter the ODroid-HC4 (I purchased mine from Ameridroid but Hardkernel works with numerous distributors) :

  
  

  

  ODroid-HC4 with an SSD and a conventional drive

  
  

  I ordered this earlier in the year and after many months of procrastinating and obsessing over the best approach to take with its general usage, I finally have it in service as my new NAS. Comparing point by point with the HC2 :

  1. The gigabit ethernet runs at full speed (though a few things on my network run at 2.5 GbE now, so I guess I’ll always be behind)
  2. The ARM chip (Amlogic S905X3) has AES cryptography acceleration and handles all the LUKS stuff without breaking a sweat ; “cryptsetup benchmark” reports between 500-600 MBytes/s on all the AES variants
  3. The USB port is still only USB2, so no improvement there
  4. 64-bit ARM, which means I can run Minio to simulate block storage in a local dev environment for some larger projects I would like to undertake
  5. Supports 2 drives, if RAID is your thing

  How I Set It Up
  How to set up the drive configuration ? As should be apparent from the photo above, I elected for an SSD (500 GB) for speed, paired with a conventional spinning HDD (18 TB) for sheer capacity. I’m not particularly trusting of RAID. I’ve watched it fail too many times, on systems that I don’t even manage, not to mention that aforementioned RAID brick that I had attached to the Apple AirPort Extreme.

  I had long been planning to use bcache, the block caching interface for Linux, which can use the SSD as a speedy cache in front of the more capacious disk. There is also LVM cache, which is supposed to achieve something similar. And then I had to evaluate the trade-offs in whether I wanted write-back, write-through, or write-around configurations.

  This was all predicated on the assumption that the spinning drive would not be able to saturate the gigabit connection. When I got around to setting up the hardware and trying some basic tests, I found that the conventional HDD had no trouble keeping up with the gigabit data rate, both reading and writing, somewhat obviating the need for SSD acceleration using any elaborate caching mechanisms.

  Maybe that’s because I sprung for the WD Red Pro series this time, rather than the Red Plus ? I’m guessing that conventional drives do deteriorate over the years. I’ll find out.

  For the operating system, I stuck with my newest favorite Linux distro : DietPi. While HardKernel (parent of ODroid) makes images for the HC units, I had also used DietPi for the HC2 for the past few years, as it tends to stay more up to date.

  Then I rsync’d my data from HC2 -> HC4. It was only about 6.5 TB of total data but it took days as this WD Red Plus drive is only capable of reading at around 10 MBytes/s these days. Painful.

  For file sharing, I’m pretty sure most normal folks have nice web UIs in their NAS boxes which allow them to easily configure and monitor the shares. I know there are such applications I could set up. But I’ve been doing this so long, I just do a bare bones setup through the terminal. I installed regular Samba and then brought over my smb.conf file from the HC2. 1 by 1, I tested that each of the old shares were activated on the new NAS and deactivated on the old NAS. I also set up a new share for the SSD. I guess that will just serve as a fast I/O scratch space on the NAS.

  The conventional drive spins up and down. That’s annoying when I’m actively working on something but manage not to hit the drive for like 5 minutes and then an application blocks while the drive wakes up. I suppose I could set it up so that it is always running. However, I micro-manage this with a custom bash script I wrote a long time ago which logs into the NAS and runs the “date” command every 2 minutes, appending the output to a file. As a bonus, it also prints data rate up/down stats every 5 seconds. The spinning file (“nas-main/zz-keep-spinning/keep-spinning.txt”) has never been cleared and has nearly a quarter million lines. I suppose that implies that it has kept the drive spinning for 1/2 million minutes which works out to around 347 total days. I should compare that against the drive’s SMART stats, if I can remember how. The earliest timestamp in the file is from March 2018, so I know the HC2 NAS has been in service at least that long.

  For tasks, vintage cron still does everything I could need. In this case, that means reaching out to websites (like this one) and automatically backing up static files.

  I also have to have a special script for starting up. Fortunately, I was able to bring this over from the HC2 and tweak it. The data disks (though not boot disk) are encrypted. Those need to be unlocked and only then is it safe for the Samba and Minio services to start up. So one script does all that heavy lifting in the rare case of a reboot (this is the type of system that’s well worth having on a reliable UPS).

  Further Work
  I need to figure out how to use the OLED display on the NAS, and how to make it show something more useful than the current time and date, which is what it does in its default configuration with HardKernel’s own Linux distro. With DietPi, it does nothing by default. I’m thinking it should be able to show the percent usage of each of the 2 drives, at a minimum.

  I also need to establish a more responsible backup regimen. I’m way too lazy about this. Fortunately, I reason that I can keep the original HC2 in service, repurposed to accept backups from the main NAS. Again, I’m sort of micro-managing this since a huge amount of data isn’t worth backing up (remember the whole DataHoarder bit), but the most important stuff will be shipped off.

  The post Adventures In NAS first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.

• What Is Ethical SEO & Why Does It Matter ?

  7 mai 2024, par Erin

  Do you want to generate more revenue ?

  Then, you need to ensure you have a steady stream of traffic flowing to your site.

  Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo are powerful mediums you can use to scale your business.

  Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of creating search engine-friendly content to draw in traffic to your website. But, if you aren’t careful, you could be crossing the line of ethical SEO into unethical SEO.

  In this article, we break down what ethical SEO is, why it’s important in business and how you can implement effective SEO into your business while remaining ethical.

  Let’s begin.

  What is ethical SEO ?

  Since the early days of the internet and search engines, business owners and marketers have tried using all kinds of SEO tactics to rank atop the search engines for relevant keywords.

  The problem ?

  Some of these practices are ethical, while others aren’t.

  What exactly is ethical SEO ?

  It’s the practice of optimising your website’s rankings in search engines by following search engine guidelines and prioritising user experience.

  

  Ethical SEO is also referred to as “white hat SEO.”

  On the other hand, businesses that break search engine rules and guidelines to “hack” their way to the top with faulty and questionable practices use unethical SEO, or “black hat SEO.”

  Ethical SEO aims to achieve higher rankings in search engines through sustainable, legitimate and fair methods.

  Black hat, or unethical SEO, aims to manipulate or “game” the system with deceptive strategies to bypass the search engine’s guidelines to rank higher.

  The two core branches of ethical SEO include :

  1. Strategies that align with search engine guidelines.
  2. Accessibility to broad audiences.

  Some examples of ethical SEO principles include :

  • Natural link building
  • Compliance with search engine guidelines
  • Establishing great user experiences
  • Creating reader-focused content

  By sticking to the right guidelines and implementing proper SEO practices, businesses can establish ethical SEO to generate more traffic and grow their brands.

  8 ethical SEO practices to implement

  If you want to grow your organic search traffic, then there’s no doubt you’ll need to have some SEO knowledge.

  While there are dozens of ways to “game” SEO, it’s best to stick to proven, ethical SEO techniques to improve your rankings.

  Stick to these best practices to increase your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), increase organic traffic and improve your website conversions.

  

  1. Crafting high-quality content

  The most important piece of any ethical SEO strategy is content.

  Forget about rankings, keywords and links for a second.

  Step back and think about why people go to Google, Bing and Yahoo in the first place.

  They’re there looking for information. They have a question they need answered. That’s where you can come in and give them the answer they want. 

  How ? In the form of content.

  The best long-term ethical SEO strategy is to create the highest-quality content possible. Crafting high-quality content should be where you focus 90% of your SEO efforts.

  2. Following search engine guidelines

  Once you’ve got a solid content creation strategy, where you’re producing in-depth, quality content, you need to ensure you’re following the guidelines and rules put in place by the major search engines.

  This means you need to stay compliant with the best practices and guidelines laid out by the top search engines.

  If you fail to follow these rules, you could be penalised, your content could be downgraded or removed from search engines, and you could even have your entire website flagged, impacting your entire organic search traffic from your site.

  You need to ensure you align with the guidelines so you’re set up for long-term success with your SEO.

  3. Conducting keyword research and optimisation

  Now that we’ve covered content and guidelines, let’s talk about the technical stuff, starting with keywords.

  In the early days of SEO (late 90s), just about anyone could rank a web page high by stuffing keywords all over the page.

  While those black hat techniques used to work to “game” the system, it doesn’t work like that anymore. Google and other major search engines have much more advanced algorithms that can detect keyword stuffing and manipulation.

  Keywords are still a major part of a successful SEO strategy. You can ethically incorporate keywords into your content (and you should) if you want to rank higher. 

  Your main goal with your content is to match it with the search intent. So, incorporating keywords should come naturally throughout your content. If you try to stuff in unnecessary keywords or use spammy techniques, you may not even rank at all and could harm your website’s rankings.

  4. Incorporating natural link building

  After you’ve covered content and keywords, it’s time to dive into links. Backlinks are any links that point back to your website from another website.

  These are a crucial part of the SEO pie. Without them, it’s hard to rank high on Google. They work well because they tell Google your web page or website has authority on a subject matter.

  But you could be penalised if you try to manipulate backlinks by purchasing them or spamming them from other websites.

  Instead, you should aim to draw in natural backlinks by creating content that attracts them.

  How ? There are several options :

  • Content marketing
  • Email outreach
  • Brand mentions
  • Public relations
  • Ethical guest posting

  Get involved in other people’s communities. Get on podcasts. Write guest posts. Connect with other brands. Provide value in your niche and create content worth linking to.

  5. Respecting the intellectual property of other brands

  Content creation is moving at lightspeed in the creator economy and social media era. For better or for worse, content is going viral every day. People share content, place their spin on it, revise it, optimise it, and spread it around the internet.

  Unfortunately, this means the content is sometimes shared without the owner’s permission. Content is one form of intellectual property (IP). 

  If you share copyrighted material, you could face legal consequences.

  6. Ensuring transparency

  Transparency is one of the pillars of ethical marketing.

  If you’re running the SEO in your company or an agency, you should always explain the SEO strategies and tactics you’re implementing to your stakeholders.

  It’s best to lean on transparency and honesty to ensure your team knows you’re running operations ethically.

  7. Implementing a great user experience

  The final pillar of ethical SEO practices is offering a great user experience on your website.

  Major search engines like Google are favouring user experience more and more every year. This means knowing how to track and analyse website metrics like page load times, time on page, pageviews, media plays and event tracking.

  8. Use an ethical web analytics solution

  Last but certainly not least. Tracking your website visitors ethically is key to maintaining SEO ethics.

  You can do this by using an ethical web analytics solution like Matomo, Plausible or Fathom. All three are committed to respecting user privacy and offer ethical tracking of visitors.

  We’re a bit biassed towards Matomo, of course, but for good reasons.

  Matomo offers accurate, unsampled data along with advanced features like heatmaps, session recording, and A/B testing. These features enhance user experience and support ethical SEO practices by providing insights into user behaviour, helping optimise content. 

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  6 unethical SEO practices to avoid

  Now that we’ve covered the ethical SEO best practices let’s talk about what kind of unethical SEO practices you want to avoid.

  Remember, SEO isn’t as easy to manipulate as it once was 20 years ago.

  Algorithms are much more sophisticated now, and search engines are getting better at detecting fraudulent, scammy or unethical SEO practices every year.

  Avoid these eight unethical SEO practices to ensure you can rank high in the long term :

  

  1. Keyword stuffing

  Keyword stuffing is probably the most common unethical SEO practice. This is where someone deliberately stuffs keywords onto a page to manipulate the search engines to rank a web page higher.

  Where this is unethical isn’t always easy to detect, but in some cases, it is. It comes down to whether it’s relevant and natural or intentionally stuffing.

  2. Cloaking

  Cloaking is another unethical SEO practice where someone manipulates the information search engines see on their website.

  For example, someone may show search engines one web page on their website, but when someone clicks on it in Google, they can direct someone to a completely different page. They do this by detecting the incoming request from the user agent and presenting different content.

  3. Deceiving functionality

  Another way companies are unethically implementing SEO tactics is by deceiving people with misleading information. For example, a website may claim to provide a free resource or directory but may intentionally lead visitors to paid products.

  4. Fraudulent redirects

  Another way to deceive or mislead searchers is by creating fraudulent redirects. A redirect is a way to take someone to a different web page when they click on another one. Redirects can be useful if a page is broken or outdated. However, they can be used to deceptively take someone to a website they didn’t intend to view.

  5. Negative SEO

  Negative SEO is the intentional attempt to harm a competitor’s search engine rankings through unethical tactics.

  These tactics include duplicating their content or generating spammy links by creating low quality or irrelevant backlinks to their site.

  6. Hidden text

  Placing hidden text on a website typically has one purpose : keyword stuffing.

  Instead of making it visible to users reading the content, websites will place invisible text or text that’s hard to read on a website to try to rank the content higher and manipulate the search engines.

  3 reasons you need to implement ethical SEO

  So, why should you ensure you only implement ethical SEO in your organic traffic strategy ?

  It’s not just about what’s morally right or wrong. Implementing ethical SEO is the smartest long-term marketing strategy :

  1. Better long-term SEO

  Search engine optimisation is about implementing the “right” tactics to get your website to rank higher.

  The funny thing is many people are trying to get quick fixes by manipulating search engines to see results now.

  However, the ones who implement shady tactics and “hacks” to game the system almost always end up losing their rankings in the long term. 

  The best long-term SEO strategy is to do things ethically. Create content that helps people. Make higher quality content than your competitors. If you do those two things right, you’ll have better search traffic for years.

  2. Great brand reputation

  Not only is ethical SEO a great way to get long-term results, but it’s also a good way to maintain a solid brand reputation.

  Reputation management is a crucial aspect of SEO. All it takes is one bad incident, and your SEO could be negatively impacted.

  3. Lower chance of penalties

  If you play by the rules, you have a lower risk of being penalised by Google.

  The reality is that Google owns the search engine, not you. While we can benefit from the traffic generation of major search engines, you could lose all your rankings if you break their guidelines.

  Track SEO data ethically with Matomo

  Ethical SEO is all about :

  • Serving your audience
  • Getting better traffic in the long run

  If you fail to follow ethical SEO practices, you could be de-ranked or have your reputation on the line.

  However, if you implement ethical SEO, you could reap the rewards of a sustainable marketing strategy that helps you grow your traffic correctly and increase conversions in the long term.

  If you’re ready to start implementing ethical SEO, you need to ensure you depend on an ethical web analytics solution like Matomo.

  Unlike other web analytics solutions, Matomo prioritises user privacy, maintains transparent, ethical data collection practices, and does not sell user data to advertisers. Matomo provides 100% data ownership, ensuring that your data remains yours to own and control.

  As the leading privacy-friendly web analytics solution globally, trusted by over 1 million websites, Matomo ensures :

  • Accurate data without data sampling for confident insights and better results
  • Privacy-friendly and GDPR-compliant web analytics
  • Open-source access for transparency and creating a custom solution tailored to your needs

  Try Matomo free for 21-days. No credit card required.

  Try Matomo for Free

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• Revision 30966 : eviter le moche ’doctype_ecrire’ lors de l’upgrade

  17 août 2009, par fil@… — Log

  eviter le moche ’doctype_ecrire’ lors de l’upgrade