ntzyz's space

Four months ago I brought an HP Z620 workstation to run virtual machines at home with Hyper-V Server. Some days later I planned to replace the SSD in the workstation from Samsung 860EVO 500G to Intel DC P4510 2TB for more capacity and better performance. But after hardware upgrade I found that P4510 just didn't get recognize by the boot loader. It seemed that I need to do some more work to boot ESXi from this NVMe SSD.

The simplest solution is using Clover Boot Loader as secondary boot loader. But the automatic OS scans provided by Clover does not support VMware ESXi, meanwhile creating a custom entry is quite bother job as writing XML manually by human is just another disaster.

After some simple research I reached out that unified extensible firmware interface itself dose support load driver before OS boot, so EFI Shell with a customized startup script may solve this problem for me. Firstly create a ESP partition on one disk with GUID partition table which is recognizable by the stock firmware, copy UEFI Shell binary as well as the NVMe driver binary to that partition, then create startup.nsh in that partition with following script:

load -nc fs0:\NvmExpressDxe-64.efi
connect -r
map -u
fs1:\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI

The script is quite easy to understand. But remember to change the locations and names of these binaries to your own.

After that, use efibootmgr under Linux or some utilities under Windows PE to create a new EFI boot entry with EFI shell as the loader, and then set it to default entry. Note that the disk alias may be different on each machine, to find out your own aliases just boot into the efi shell, load the NVMe driver and use the map command to show partition aliases.

May be the simplest solution is just install ESXi to one HDD and place all virtual disks in the NVMe SSD?

References

1. [Guide] NVMe-boot without modding your UEFI/BIOS (Clover-EFI bootloader method)
2. UEFI Shell Specification
3. Error-handling in EFI startup shell scripts - Super User

其实这个叫 GitHub Actions 的持续集成已经上线很久了，在刚刚公开测试时我就尝试去使用，结果翻来翻去没找到 MongoDB 数据库的项目应该如何配置基础环境 不要问我当时为什么用了 MongoDB，我现在非常后悔（雾）。今天摸鱼的时候突然想到 Actions 支持 Docker，Docker 又能快速的启动一个 MongoDB 官方提供的容器，那么这就好办了，直接对着自己的博客下手，来试一试这个工具。

在仓库首页里点击 Actions 标签进入配置页面，并直接创建一个新的 Node CI 类型的 Workflow，这样就能获得一个适用于 node.js 项目的配置模版。和 Travis 一样，Actions 的模版配置也是使用 YAML 格式，写起来比 JSON 舒服多了。之后只需要在 steps 中添加以下内容即可启动一个 MongoDB 容器：

- name: Launch MongoDB
  run: |
    sudo docker container run --name mongo -v $PWD:/src -p 27017:27017 -d mongo
    sleep 4s
- name: Import initial database
  run: |
    sudo docker container ls --all
    sudo docker container exec mongo mongo localhost/newBlog /src/db.default.js

The house I rented in Shanghai only provides wireless network (802.11n) to access the Internet, but I personally hope that I can get a faster wireless intranet and hide my network device from the outside, so I purchased a NETGEAR A6210 wireless network card featuring 802.11AC support and USB 3.0 interface, ready to make such a network connection:

+--------------------+       +-----------------------+
| LAN(802.11AC + GbE)| CAT5E |  HP ProLiant MS Gen8  |
| (PS4, Kindle, etc) +-------+  eth0: 192.168.137.1  |
|  192.168.137.0/24  |       | wlan0: 192.168.0.x/24 |
+--------------------+       +---+-------------------+
                                 | 802.11n
                             +---+------------+
                             | TP-LINK Router |
                             +----------------+

Implenemting this kind of structure is quiet simple for Linux PCs. You only need to enable ip_forward and execute iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE with root privilege. But unfortunately this USB3.0 wireless NIC has no driver in the mainline kernel. The open source driver provided by MTK has very bad performance under OpenWrt. In conclusion, it seems that the only choice of operating system is Windows.

Configuring such a network for Windows is very simple too. Right-clicking on the adapter of the wireless network card. Then select the Sharing tab, check Allow other network users to connect etc. Then choose the Ethernet Network Connection option from the dropdown. However, Microsoft has buried a bug in the implementation of network sharing in Windows 10: the network sharing will be broken after restarting the computer. Shared interface still providing DHCP service, but IP Forward is completely unavailable. After reactivate the network connection shareing, the problem can be solved.

So, we only need to prepare a scheduled task running the following PowerShell script to make the OS repeat this operation every time when it is booted:

$NetShare = New-Object -ComObject HNetCfg.HNetShare
$wlan = $null
$ethernet = $null

foreach ($int in $NetShare.EnumEveryConnection) {
  $props = $NetShare.NetConnectionProps.Invoke($int)
  if ($props.Name -eq "WLAN") {
    $wlan = $int;
  }
  if ($props.Name -eq "网桥") {
    $ethernet = $int;
  }
}

$wlanConfig = $NetShare.INetSharingConfigurationForINetConnection.Invoke($wlan);
$ethernetConfig = $NetShare.INetSharingConfigurationForINetConnection.Invoke($ethernet);

$wlanConfig.DisableSharing();
$ethernetConfig.DisableSharing();

$wlanConfig.EnableSharing(0);
$ethernetConfig.EnableSharing(1);

References

1. NetConnectionSharing (PowerShell Module)

今年六月份突然脑抽想买个很“传统”的 MP3 回来玩玩，于是就从同学那收了这么一个大法的播放器：NW-A45。到手之后检查了一下机器，几乎是全新成色，带一个 64GB 的 TF 卡，非常兴奋。但当我接上了电脑准备开始快乐地复制音乐时，我突然意识到一个问题：我从哪里复制呢？

在高中的时候，我还是保持着从网上收集音乐并整理好的习惯，原因是当时手里的播放器是 Apple iPod nano 6，整理妥当的音乐在使用 iTunes 同步时会方便很多很多。不过后来被人安利了网易云音乐之后，这个收集和整理的习惯就彻底停下来了，原因同样很简单，在线的音乐服务使用起来比自己整理要便捷太多太多。也因为如此，iPod nano 正式退休，开始养（吃）老（灰）。这之后我都是一直使用着网易云音乐，为了解决手机 16GB 存不下音乐的问题还购买了一个 iPod Touch，64G 的版本拿来听歌显然时毫无问题的。就这样，网易云音乐 + iPod Touch 的组合用到了现在。

回到从前的整理音乐+使用工具同步肯定是不会去做的，这辈子都不可能。然而 Walkman 买都买了，不把这个设备用起来就很不服气。仔细思考了一下，网易云音乐上的歌曲其实是可以随意下载的（会员才能下无损，但这不是重点），不过下载了歌曲是会丢失当时整理歌单时的顺序和分类，这一点说重要也不怎么重要，但是我很不愿意半夜听歌时随机到一些奇怪的音乐（比如血源诅咒的 OST，怕不是半夜直接吓醒），所以歌单这一信息还是有必要保留下来的。