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What did you do this weekend?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
I did some shopping! Puppy got a backpack carrier and rain jacket for our upcoming camping trip. Not sure if she’ll take to the former, but the hike we’re doing is pretty intense, so I want to have the option to carry her.
I also picked up a snake plant for the home office.
My bird was unexpectedly ill this weekend, so I spent most of Sunday at the vet’s. Luckily, it was not as expensive as I was anticipating! According to the vet it’s just a bacterial infection in the crop, nothing serious.
I fixed a Game Boy Advance I paid too much for. It was bought with an AGS-101 (the second GBA SP) screen mod. I would accidentally hit Start+Select and my flash carts would die. Then I found out about multiboot mode (part of GBA BIOS), but it shouldn't be affecting already booted carts. I decided to try a regular cartridge in, and same thing happened. Looking around, I found a forum post somewhere saying there's an issue with that mod where the ribbon cable for the modded display shorts against the cartridge pins, and to drop some kapton tape over the pins. I only have masking tape right now, so used that. Now my gameboy doesn't short out. I'm going on a trip to help coordinate stuff for my brother's wedding (planned for August), and figured it'd be fun to grind my Pokemon saves or something during down time, and wanted to get it 100% fixed before I leave.
I spent most of the weekend working on tasks related to getting graphics passthrough with ESXi on a server. I want to expose a physical graphics card to a virtual machine. And it's proving much more difficult than expected.
I was able to get the VMs (Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019) to see the card, but it wasn't really using the card when it should have been. It's an old 2GB AMD Radeon HD 6570.
At least 12hrs of all that was backing up a VM. And before that, I probably spent 3hrs trying to figure out how to backup a VM on ESXi. I ended up having to move from the free version of ESXi to a paid version...by pirating a key. I can't spend $500 on a legitimate key, especially just for homelab stuff. Then I used a free community edition of Veeam to do the backup. Highly recommend; super simple to use.
After that, I ripped out the RAID 5 configuration with ESXi and my VMs and put a different set of drives, set them as JBOD and installed Unraid as my hypervisor of sorts. Heard it might be easier get graphics passthrough to work with Unraid. I also learned that I should be able to put that RAID 5 config back in with no issues. I hope that's true, but that's also why I backed up the VM just in case...
From Saturday to Sunday, I was up for at least 20hrs straight doing this stuff. But I also did additional research, played some Last Oasis, and watched the season opener F1 race. What a race! Though too bad Max Verstappen didn't win =(
So now I'm back to trying to install a VM on Unraid. We shall see how it goes!