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Author Topic: The Generic Computer Advice Thread  (Read 562641 times)

AzyWng

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5205 on: April 24, 2024, 11:58:46 am »

Anyone here familiar with Heroic Games Launcher or Lutris? Been trying to play Battle Brothers on my Linux computer but strangely, while I can install the game using both Heroic and Lutris, I can't run it through the launcher.

However, I can run the game by going into the game files and running its executable. I'm not sure why that is, but I'd prefer to be able to simply run the game through the launcher(s).
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wierd

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5206 on: May 09, 2024, 03:55:33 am »

When you set up your lutris container, did you specify the path for the executable?

Like how I have New Vegas set up here?

This tells the launcher what context to execute from.  Without that context, the launcher might fail to find the game executable, or fail to find game assets. Many games need this "Working folder" location specified, or they just dont work.
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McTraveller

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5207 on: May 09, 2024, 09:11:58 pm »

I'm wracking my brain trying to figure out how to diagnose bottlenecks in my home network/backup system (my backup NAS had some issues, so I have to re-baseline my backups from 4 machines...).

Trying to copy files from one computer to another for backup, using both SMB and just rsync over SSH, I'm getting peak transfer rates of only like 6MByte/s.  Average rate is more like 2MB/s.

This makes no sense to me, since I can download stuff "from the internet" at around 100MB/s, so I know it's not either my WiFi or my hard disk - they can handle much faster rates (at least on the destination computer).  I even switched the laptop from WiFi (100MBit+) to its 1GBit hardline, but that doesn't seem to be helping much.

I am copying from an older laptop, so old it's battery is completely dead, so it's running only on wall power.  Perhaps the old computer is throttling itself because of no battery? I really can't tell, but it's taking ages.

I'm almost ready to go buy a chassis to use the HDD in the old computer (it is an SSD, so shouldn't be the limit?) as an external drive.  I don't really want to wait 5 hours to copy the remaining 37GB, which is what it would take at an average of 2MB/s...

I am thinking of using one of my routers to try and go hardline to hardline, but it doesn't feel like a bandwidth issue...
« Last Edit: May 09, 2024, 09:20:21 pm by McTraveller »
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wierd

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5208 on: May 10, 2024, 01:02:16 am »

It sounds like a protocol overhead issue.

On a gigabit lan, I get about 10mb/sec with SMB, and about 20mb/sec with NFS3.

You can get better transfers with rsync if you tell it to compress the datastream, and have a good frame size defined.
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McTraveller

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5209 on: May 12, 2024, 05:07:00 pm »

Turns out it's a combination of poor WiFi signal and a failing drive.

The signal issue is easily remedied for "free", but the drive is going to have a material cost :(

EDIT: the drive is the main culprit. I've got a hardwired connection to the NAS at the moment, and it's claiming another 22 hours remain to back up 10GB.  That's 126kB/s average transfer rate...
« Last Edit: May 17, 2024, 09:29:43 am by McTraveller »
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Djohaal

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5210 on: May 21, 2024, 03:54:59 pm »

Ok so what could be the causes of my computer not getting the delivered speed I'm supposed to. I'm getting a meager 100Mbit/s

I have an optical fiber modem at the living room that receives my contracted ISP signal, which is 400Mbit/s.

I tested the modem with a 5ghz cell phone and it does deliver the speed, so its not the ISP fumbling the connection. ISP technician swears the RJ45 ports in the modem are 1 gigabit.

The computer sits on another office, I had to run about 25 meters of CAT6 cable trough the walls to get there. Cables are in somewhat insulated piping, as far as we could tell not running any other communication or energy cables next to them. Cable was tested with that tester doodad that shines numbered LEDs in sequence, at least with that it seems correct.

On the computer end it only negotiates 100/100 or sometimes even a miserable 10/10 speed with the modem, when it slows down I have to switch the CAT6 cable around, or reboot the modem, or pray to the internet gods.
My motherboard is rated to gigabit speeds, and juuuust to be sure I bought a cheap 1 gigabit PCI-e card which also only negotiates 100/100 speeds.

The only thing I didn't test yet was another cable just to be sure this one isn't damaged, we did have some rough time making it pass trough the electric pipes. However I'd expect the cable to be either hit or miss and stop working if it was damaged?

Could there be some obscure and arcane hidden settings somewhere in my computer throttling the LAN speed?
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Also, tadpoles.

Lord Shonus

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5211 on: May 21, 2024, 04:12:32 pm »

Ok so what could be the causes of my computer not getting the delivered speed I'm supposed to. I'm getting a meager 100Mbit/s

I have an optical fiber modem at the living room that receives my contracted ISP signal, which is 400Mbit/s.

I tested the modem with a 5ghz cell phone and it does deliver the speed, so its not the ISP fumbling the connection. ISP technician swears the RJ45 ports in the modem are 1 gigabit.

The computer sits on another office, I had to run about 25 meters of CAT6 cable trough the walls to get there. Cables are in somewhat insulated piping, as far as we could tell not running any other communication or energy cables next to them. Cable was tested with that tester doodad that shines numbered LEDs in sequence, at least with that it seems correct.

On the computer end it only negotiates 100/100 or sometimes even a miserable 10/10 speed with the modem, when it slows down I have to switch the CAT6 cable around, or reboot the modem, or pray to the internet gods.
My motherboard is rated to gigabit speeds, and juuuust to be sure I bought a cheap 1 gigabit PCI-e card which also only negotiates 100/100 speeds.

The only thing I didn't test yet was another cable just to be sure this one isn't damaged, we did have some rough time making it pass trough the electric pipes. However I'd expect the cable to be either hit or miss and stop working if it was damaged?

Could there be some obscure and arcane hidden settings somewhere in my computer throttling the LAN speed?
It could in fact be a dodgy cable. What often happens is that the computer tries to negotiate a gigabit connection, fails, then falls back to 100. If that fails, it falls back to 10.
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Starver

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5212 on: May 27, 2024, 09:24:59 am »

This is a pain.

I need (probably, but it'd be a good start) to 'offline edit' an XP machine's registry, to stop it always booting to Safe Mode GUI (even when requesting Safe Mode with Command Prompt, via F8). This is because the keyboard (and mouse) are not working by the time I get into SM. They work in BIOS, and during the F8 "choose how to boot" stage, but stop responding (evidenced by classic NumLock testing, at least for the keyboard) once past the F8 (optional) stage. Regular, uncomplicated USB plug-ins (hardware too 'new' to have PS/2 on backplate... pity, as I've dug up a PS/2 keyboard right here that probably works, before realising it was not the solution). Mouse only ever gets chance to prove itself in firmware diagnostic screen from F12 boot-up (where it, or keyboard, can navigate the proprietary UI that uses), but that seems good enough to me.

Ruling out hardware issues, the machine worked fine before the reboot, swapping USB plugs to different sockets gives identical working/non-working responses, both items are uncomplicated enough to be fully supported by anything maybe Win98-era onwards. Mouse is optical, not ball, but of the kind that is hardware-agnostic to anything that would work with USB-ball, and the light on further proves USB sockets are powered.

I think, therefore, I need to regedit (command line, if necessary) the "force reboot to (GUI) Safe Mode" option that I think is to blame for this, or else edit some .INI item/similar (less likely, but currently also unable to do). No XP disc here (probably should be a recovery partition, given the original manufacturer, but can't access that so not sure if it survived past reinstallations), all my old regular bootable discs are half a day's travel away and may also have 'expired' as I haven't used them for a while and originally burnt them to CD-R(W) well over a decade ago, and the places where I would take the trusted Third Party Recovery Discs from seem to be on the wrong side of linkrot/domain-expiry.

Probably could burn some bootable-CD anew (maybe bootable-DVD, though all there is in the immediate vicinity on a working machine is a CD-R(W) drive, anything more is a pain, and I'd have to go get a new USB drive to make that bootable). But I'm a bit wary about some solutions, or even if they do what I think I need them to do. So any suggestions before I escalate my own efforts and resort to jumping in the car would be appreciated.  Too much cruft and unrelated and (probably) unreliable/untrustworthy linkage in my current 'refresher' search for Recovery Discs, etc, and it seems like my old favourites may have become unsupported, ruined or maybe changed their names.

Next best option is to transplant the drive and mount it into another machine (ideally as a secondary drive, rather than a 'mind transplant' and deal with the fuss of a whole-body-transplant situation annoying Windows), but I'm limited to certain hardware without (again) half a day's unscheduled travel, possibly still on a hiding to nothing if I can't do the 'offline' tweaks how I think I need to do them or get it to be happy in a PS/2+SATA combination. (Might be that my PS/2 stuff is only IDE, etc.)

Further fall-back option is to work out why the "USB-safe" driver is failing, given normal-mode drivers (if different!) happily worked right up until this instance, and corruption of the driver used for both, right upon this moment, seems unlikely. Also, still needing a way to fix that, if that's what needs fixing.


For the record, yes, I know it's XP (a perfectly sane OS, for the use it's being put to, and you don't want to know the fuss we'd have if we wanted to change it). I still run XPs (and earlier) of my own, but not right here, right now or sufficiently the same setup to just guarantee I could migrate things over (because of this or in general). (Even if I could spare more than a temporary repurposing.)

And the Safe Mode-forcing seems to have been done by the AV program (token, given it's not connected to anything, but you get OS complaints without one) when we were uninstalling it in preparation for reinstalling it to convince it to accept the new (Free) licence that covers its operation. (Don't know why this happened. I know for a fact that this cycle of annual renew has been working since 2017, a kludge as it may be.)


Just putting this rather old-school problem out there, for entertainment purposes, even if nobody is quick enough to shortcut my fall-back-fall-back options that I'm still holding in reserve...
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wierd

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5213 on: May 27, 2024, 10:16:55 am »

A few options:

It is possible to point a different, working, system's RegEdit at a DIFFERENT set of registry hive files.

https://jchornsey.wordpress.com/2015/03/11/accessing-another-windows-computers-registry-from-a-disk-in-windows-8-1/

(this works for XP as well.)


Another, is to use the offline password and registry editor disk, if you dont mind command line tools.
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Starver

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5214 on: May 27, 2024, 02:05:08 pm »

A few options:

It is possible to point a different, working, system's RegEdit at a DIFFERENT set of registry hive files.

https://jchornsey.wordpress.com/2015/03/11/accessing-another-windows-computers-registry-from-a-disk-in-windows-8-1/

(this works for XP as well.)


Another, is to use the offline password and registry editor disk, if you dont mind command line tools.

The first looks similar to how I was aiming, if/when I switch the drive over. But I had forgotten most of the specifics, so you've saved me a lot of investigative time if I go do that.

I absolutely love the command-line, so that'll not be a problem, if/when that's how I go. ;)  (I was looking for current (but XP-compatible) version, "chntpw" seemed to be the top search result for that, but got put off by the browser popping up a warning that the site it was on might be dangerous. Already a bit bitten, I'm being a bit shy to override the second machine's security concerns until I know I'm not going to make additional problems.)

Either way (and, what with various other thngs, I'm doing the bringing together the other long-distance hardware tomorrow, too, but one can't have too many bullets in one's ammo-pouch, and it'll perhaps be easier), this sounds like good information. Cheers. Been far too long since I've had to excercise this particular subset of little grey cells.



edit: Just to tag on here, for future readers' 'benefit'... All got sorted. But a vital bit in the process was in removing the SAFEBOOT:MINIMAL from the BOOT.JNI, on top of everything else. And, for reasons not determined, the Keyboard driver became (allegedly!) corrupt by the time we got into the normal booting-up (mouse was Ok... so cue some creative use of CharMap utity as an awkward on-screen keyboard!) which I can't really work out if it was true or just a side-effect of something else. Straight replacing the driver with the direct HID driver (internally available options, default install) wouldn't take. Forcing the *wrong* HID driver, then the one I first wanted (exact same inbuilt source), got it working without further quibble and not even a reboot necessary. Computers, eh? ;)
« Last Edit: May 30, 2024, 06:54:45 am by Starver »
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AzyWng

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5215 on: June 05, 2024, 08:06:02 pm »

When you set up your lutris container, did you specify the path for the executable?

Like how I have New Vegas set up here?

This tells the launcher what context to execute from.  Without that context, the launcher might fail to find the game executable, or fail to find game assets. Many games need this "Working folder" location specified, or they just dont work.

I managed to fix the problem, but I’m afraid I’m not sure how - I just reinstalled the game from scratch and it seems to work from the launcher now. It’s possible an update or ther change I made fixed it, but I’m not sure.
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Djohaal

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5216 on: June 06, 2024, 07:38:19 pm »

Ok so what could be the causes of my computer not getting the delivered speed I'm supposed to. I'm getting a meager 100Mbit/s

I have an optical fiber modem at the living room that receives my contracted ISP signal, which is 400Mbit/s.

I tested the modem with a 5ghz cell phone and it does deliver the speed, so its not the ISP fumbling the connection. ISP technician swears the RJ45 ports in the modem are 1 gigabit.

The computer sits on another office, I had to run about 25 meters of CAT6 cable trough the walls to get there. Cables are in somewhat insulated piping, as far as we could tell not running any other communication or energy cables next to them. Cable was tested with that tester doodad that shines numbered LEDs in sequence, at least with that it seems correct.

On the computer end it only negotiates 100/100 or sometimes even a miserable 10/10 speed with the modem, when it slows down I have to switch the CAT6 cable around, or reboot the modem, or pray to the internet gods.
My motherboard is rated to gigabit speeds, and juuuust to be sure I bought a cheap 1 gigabit PCI-e card which also only negotiates 100/100 speeds.

The only thing I didn't test yet was another cable just to be sure this one isn't damaged, we did have some rough time making it pass trough the electric pipes. However I'd expect the cable to be either hit or miss and stop working if it was damaged?

Could there be some obscure and arcane hidden settings somewhere in my computer throttling the LAN speed?
It could in fact be a dodgy cable. What often happens is that the computer tries to negotiate a gigabit connection, fails, then falls back to 100. If that fails, it falls back to 10.

It was indeed a bad cable problem, although we ended ripping out the cable from the conduits and now can't seem to pass it by pushing. I'll sort that out later, but for now my intertubes work as supposed.
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I really want that one as a "when". I want "grubs", and "virgin woman" to turn into a dragon. and monkey children to suddenly sprout wings. And I want the Dwarven Mutant Academy to only gain their powers upon reaching puberty. I also have a whole host of odd creatures that only make sense if I divide them into children and adults.

Also, tadpoles.

wierd

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5217 on: June 07, 2024, 01:45:40 am »

Ok so what could be the causes of my computer not getting the delivered speed I'm supposed to. I'm getting a meager 100Mbit/s

I have an optical fiber modem at the living room that receives my contracted ISP signal, which is 400Mbit/s.

I tested the modem with a 5ghz cell phone and it does deliver the speed, so its not the ISP fumbling the connection. ISP technician swears the RJ45 ports in the modem are 1 gigabit.

The computer sits on another office, I had to run about 25 meters of CAT6 cable trough the walls to get there. Cables are in somewhat insulated piping, as far as we could tell not running any other communication or energy cables next to them. Cable was tested with that tester doodad that shines numbered LEDs in sequence, at least with that it seems correct.

On the computer end it only negotiates 100/100 or sometimes even a miserable 10/10 speed with the modem, when it slows down I have to switch the CAT6 cable around, or reboot the modem, or pray to the internet gods.
My motherboard is rated to gigabit speeds, and juuuust to be sure I bought a cheap 1 gigabit PCI-e card which also only negotiates 100/100 speeds.

The only thing I didn't test yet was another cable just to be sure this one isn't damaged, we did have some rough time making it pass trough the electric pipes. However I'd expect the cable to be either hit or miss and stop working if it was damaged?

Could there be some obscure and arcane hidden settings somewhere in my computer throttling the LAN speed?
It could in fact be a dodgy cable. What often happens is that the computer tries to negotiate a gigabit connection, fails, then falls back to 100. If that fails, it falls back to 10.

It was indeed a bad cable problem, although we ended ripping out the cable from the conduits and now can't seem to pass it by pushing. I'll sort that out later, but for now my intertubes work as supposed.

Use a guide string.  Either drop it down the conduit, or suck it up the conduit, using a shopvac, whichever is most appropriate or expedient.
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heydude6

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5218 on: July 09, 2024, 02:54:54 pm »

So this isn't really a request for advice, but more of a question to tech-Savvy friends.

Been learning about networking recently, and have successfully coded a program that works through the internet. With that in mind, I wanted to ask:

How do you guys feel about NAT in routers? From what I understand, NAT was invented to resolve the problem of there not being enough IP addresses cause IPv4 is too small of a range of numbers. Unfortunately, with the way NAT is designed, Peer-to-Peer connections are a lot harder to establish. You either have to do port-forwarding or hole-punching which are both unideal. Hole punching doesn't always work either due to the lack of standardization across routers.

Personally, I think Peer-to-Peer would be a much more common connection format if it weren't for NAT (or if at least some router ports were forwarded by default). I could easily imagine locally-hosted P2P alternative to Skype becoming popular if it weren't for NAT.

Anyone here understood any of technobabble I just spewed?
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Lord Shonus

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Re: The Generic Computer Advice Thread
« Reply #5219 on: July 09, 2024, 03:11:01 pm »

NAT was round before the constraints of IPv4 were a problem. Having one IP be the gateway for your entire network is far more efficient and practical than giving every single device their own internet address. It also makes security far easier to manage and makes things easier for techs.

It isn't a major hindrance for peer-to-peer stuff, either. Plenty of stuff works without port forwarding, especially with the rise of the (admittedly somewhat unreliable) uPNP protocol.
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