Software Update

[TireSmoker]

That's 'patina'.

[TireSmoker]

I'm going to be changing the email hosting for tiresmoke.org. I'll probably change it over tonight. What does it mean for you? Hopefully, nothing. You should still get the same emails for topic notifications, etc. Please let me know if they look different or are flagged as spam. (after I cutover)

In a certain sense for me, tiresmoke is like a project car and this is one of *original* pieces that hasn't been swapped since the beginning. Since tiresmoke's inception, I hosted the email portion with Google, because it free, and it was Google-- no brainer. It was also the first time I had setup something like that, so when it was working it was sort of a "dont touch it". Well, after almost two decades, they started charging monthly. Beginning fall of last year, and between tiresmoke.org and my studly.net domain, I've been stuck paying ~$25/month (!!) for friggin email. I found something a lot cheaper, like $10/yr.

To be continued...

[MostMint]

The big money making machine needs more $$$$!

I can do without the email notifications so that whole thing can be removed like an EGR valve as far as I'm concerned.

[TireSmoker]

Ok, we are cutover. We are now using purelymail.com for tiresmoke's email service instead of google.

-Dave

[TireSmoker]

Registration has been opened up and the challenge questions to stop the spambots have been changed also. It was encouraged to use questions which were not easily found on Google, so the two questions are:

What's the nickname of the orange turbo malibu?
What's our road race team name?

They only need to get one of them correct.

-Dave

[TireSmoker]

Board software has been updated to phpBB 3.3.14. Let me know if you encounter any issues.

Under lying Linux also upgraded to latest Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 24.04.

-Dave

[MostMint]

So far working good but I'm not seeing the tiresmoke logo at the top

[TireSmoker]

Good catch.. ill get it fixed.

[TireSmoker]

It's migration time, again. If you follow technology news at all, Broadcom bought VMWare a year or so back and made a publicly stated goal of locking in their 500 biggest clients, and screwing everyone else with HUGE license increases. Basically designed to make smaller customers go away. Even though I'm on the free version, they eliminated that too, so there was no more upgrade path. Broadcom re-instated the free version a few months later, but the trust is broken and it wouldn't likely run on my desktop hardware anyway. I almost lost Tiresmoke a few years ago due to being hacked while on old software, so I won't let that happen again.

Tiresmoke has been running on the free version (single host) of VMWare ESXi for many years. And I've been working with it in my job since 2007. It is the underpinning of everything. So kind of a big deal and something I wasnt looking forward to.. (and not looking forward to whatever we do at work to move off of it).

I'm moving to a product called ProxMox. It's a free product, but looks very capable. I've heard about it for years, but VMWare was the absolute best and it was free. ProxMox has more features than VMWare's free version, especially if you want to run a multi-host setup. I really don't need/want a multi-host setup, but I'll try it out since I have spare hardware.

Can you see the difference????

New Tiresmoke, on Proxmox

Old Tiresmoke, on VMWare

[Basement Paul]

You keep the spare hardware next to the spare intake manifolds??

-BP

[TireSmoker]

I bought a Dell Optiplex 5050 on ebay with an Intel i7-7700 CPU (4 cores, 3.6GHz), 8GB RAM and no hard-drive/SSD for $125/shipped. I think it was new in 2017, and this board will support a whopping 64GB of RAM. This setup should offer a huge increase of performance while also using a lot less energy. I was able to get VMWare 6.7 loaded on it, which is a big improvement over 6.0 (hopefully 7.0 will work).

I'm still waiting for a network card to arrive, but should hopefully have everything migrated in the next few days.

-Dave

The new ProxMox 9.1 machine is a slightly newer Dell Optiplex 7060, i7-8700, 16GB ram that I bought off Marketplace in 2024 for $80. It was purchased just to be backup/spare hardware. It has a 500GB NVMe on board, and I had to add in a 2TB NVMe as well. I'll eventually wipeout the VMWare box and re-load it with Proxmox.

[MostMint]

I think I forgot that Tiresmoke lives in the BASEMENT!

[TireSmoker]

You keep the spare hardware next to the spare intake manifolds??

-BP

Why yes, yes i do! Haha

[Basement Paul]

The Basement is where all the cool stuff is! Nice rack!! I would guess your intake collection is worth more than your computer collection at this point.

[GMJohnny]

If you look close enough, you’ll see a complete aluminum block 427
in the BASEMENT.

GM