0718 I'm sitting in bed this morning and can use the File Mangler app on my phone to move data between two harddrives on another computer. Wot a time to be alive.
It occurred to me that that was something I could (almost) usefully do without having to get on a proper computer, and might be a useful rate test. It's nearly 8GB of data (so a tiny fraction of the whole) and started out my moving at 5MB\s, which is fairly reasonable.
It’s about a third of the way through, and the rate has steadily dropped down to below 4MB\s. The time remaining has also steadily increased (to above the starting estimate) suggesting that this transfer will never actually finish; a Paradox of Zeno.
0820
Tried with another folder, around 21GB of mostly MP3s, and am getting a transfer rate of 8MB\s dropping to 7MB\s. Not terrible, I guess.
0850
Trying a load of 2GB files and getting 4MB\s.
Perhaps I just have to go back to accepting that this process will take A Long Time.
1121
A stupid disaster has struck: I can't login to OMV on the laptop anymore.
I have the password ‘written down’ in a disguised format, so I know what the password should be, but it won't accept it.
Hang on…
I tried logging in with ‘root’ instead of ‘admin’ and it works, so maybe the ‘admin’ user doesn't exist…
WTZ is going on?
1433
Today is proving to be a total shitshow of a day.
Figured out the password: admin is for the web interface; root is for logging in on the actual machine.
Tried Midnight Commander and it wasn't great. The harddrives seem inaccessible through it. CBA.
Then the saga began: the internet decided to fail, seemingly spontaneously.
I had been messing around with the network settings on OpenMediaVault in an attempt to access it, so I assumed the problem was that at first. It's being weird, but that's a problem for later on.
Hive hub was no longer connected so I went to look at the router: flashing orange light which apparently means “trying to connect to broadband”. Tried turning it on & off, as well as the fibre converter box: nothing.
Unplugged everything and moved the hub to the fibre box and plugged it in with a different network cable: works. Moved it back and tried the (luckily existant) other network cable running in the same direction to near the fibre box: works. Dug out network-cable-tester thing: cable which had been connecting fibre box to router was faulty… It must have happened when I was moving stuff around there recently, but only spontaneously failed somehow today. I had hoped to not have to terminate any more network cables in my life (after having done loads when initially wiring the house) because it’s fiddly AZ.
…but the network cable is already in place, and I don’t fancy running another one through all the holes through walls.
Anyway, chopped the crappy ends off the network cable and finnickied about getting all the inner wires in the right order and the right length, crimped new plugs on (forgetting to put the shroud on one end, of course) and it works again.
It was all such a waste of time on a day when I just wanted to get on with copying stuff and experimenting to find out transfer rates.
OMV is also annoying, probably due to my lack of knowledge & experience. I think I’ve zarked up the IP addresses somehow, because I can’t find them listed anywhere by using any of the methods I’ve found online. Thankfully, I can still log in via the web interface, and the network drive still shows up in File Mangler. No idea how or why.
But back to file transfers: turns out using my phone to initiate the transfers was a bit of a bad idea because it absolutely ate the phone’s battery.
Currently copying Films, which is a biggie, of mostly large files. The rate hovers between 5 and 15MB/s, with the usual inexplicable pauses at 0.
As noted earlier today, this will evidently take A Long Time, and I should just get on with it.
