Notes for November 25-December 1

It’s couch potato weather and I’ve been trying to enjoy a bit of peace and quiet, which seems to be a fitting end to a week with relatively little tinkering.

On that topic, two things are worthy of note: the first is that after my I ended up replicating the upscaling and tagging process for my insanely long collection of Bing wallpapers.

The second is that after almost , I finally upgraded my Synology NAS with a couple of new 8TB HDDs (a trivial, but slow process that mostly entailed swapping each drive and then waiting a day or so for the array to rebuild each time).

This gives me a little breathing room and allows me to start rotating the older 4TB drives to the Terramaster NAS I’m testing, but I need to budget for more drives since I want to build a full ZFS pool.

It’s a bit annoying that ZFS still isn’t as flexible as proprietary RAID approaches. Synology gets dissed every now and then because they use a semi-proprietary RAID approach (SHR), but it works seamlessly with differently-sized drives and lets you upgrade your storage pools in chunks.

The WP-UT5 wisdPi 5Gbps USB Ethernet Adapter

This is another review that has been quite some time in the making because I needed to get the right kind of additional hardware to do it justice.

There’s a lot going on in the home networking space–especially where it concerns moving beyond “just” gigabit networking. For starters, mini-PCs of all kinds are now (mostly) to shipping with 2.5GbE ports, and I recently reviewed a set of with 2.5GbE interfaces and 10GbE SFP slots.

Furthermore, , so things are indeed speeding up in consumer land.

But what can you do regarding upgrading machines like an older Mac mini? Well, that’s where USB Ethernet adapters come in–the WP-UT5 is a USB 3.2 adapter with the RTL8157 chipset that works with just about every computer I have, and that I have been testing (along with its PCI counterpart, the WP-NA5000) for a few months now.

Disclaimer: wisdPi sent me a WP-UT5 and a WP-NA5000 free of charge, and as usual this piece follows my .

This post is going to focus on the USB-C adapter, since I’ve only barely tested the PCI card–the one PC I had with a free PCI slot is still effectively in a tiny compact case, and although I assembled everything outside the case to verify things worked I couldn’t keep it strewn about my workbench (I’ve been meaning to get a bigger case, but have other priorities).

Compatibility

First of all, let’s talk about compatibility. Since it uses USB 3.2, the adapter can tap into the full 20Gbps bandwidth of the USB 3.2 spec, but it will also work with older USB 3.0 ports (which are still pretty common on older machines), although most of the machines I have tested it on have USB-C ports.

Which reminds me–besides USB-C to USB-C you also get a USB-C to USB-A cable in the box, so you can plug it into just about anything:

The WP-UT5 wisdPi 5Gbps USB Ethernet Adapter
SD Card adapter for scale

Where it regards Ethernet cabling, it’s also worth saying I had zero issues with my Cat 5 installation (which, since it consists mostly of short runs, I already knew will support 10Gbps), and pretty much any cables run in the past ten years should be able to handle 5Gbps just fine.

The real question is, of course, how well it works with different operating systems.

OS Support

So far, the experience was completely plug and play. The first machine I tested the adapter on was my work , and Windows 11 automatically downloaded and installed the driver.

As to Macs, macOS Sequoia also worked fine (and has been working for many weeks now), the only caveat being that the Network Settings panel thinks the interface is 1GbE rather than 5 (even when plugged into a 10GbE SFP).

This is solely a UI issue since I can certainly get much more than that (in fact, pretty close to line speeds, and around 4 times faster SMB file transfers than with gigabit Ethernet), and I hope Apple will fix it in a future update.

In Linux, though, things are… different. I had a couple (pre-6 or pre-6.10) machines where the adapter was either incorrectly detected or just didn’t work, but it works fine under Fedora 40, and across the multiple ARM boards I’ve tried it worked the vast majority of times.

Most of the variation here is certainly due to the usual “mystery meat” kernels that ship with SBCs, but in general, all boards with Realtek adapters (like the ) detected and activated the card on the first try (apparently re-using the same kernel driver), although, like on the Mac, the hardware reported line speed was different from what I knew was in use:

 dmesg
[ 5008.341772] usb 2-1: new SuperSpeed USB device number 2 using xhci-hcd
[ 5008.360372] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=8157, bcdDevice=30.00
[ 5008.360406] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=7
[ 5008.360421] usb 2-1: Product: USB 5G Ethernet
[ 5008.360434] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: WisdPi
[ 5008.360448] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 000334C8D6B103B9
[ 5008.432988] cdc_ncm 2-1:2.0: MAC-Address: 34:c8:d6:b1:03:b9
[ 5008.433029] cdc_ncm 2-1:2.0: setting rx_max = 16384
[ 5008.433233] cdc_ncm 2-1:2.0: setting tx_max = 16384
[ 5008.434502] cdc_ncm 2-1:2.0 eth2: register 'cdc_ncm' at usb-xhci-hcd.0.auto-1, CDC NCM (NO ZLP), 34:c8:d6:b1:03:b9
[ 5008.471894] usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_wdm
[ 5008.475904] usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_mbim

❯ lshw
...
  *-network:4
       description: Ethernet interface
       physical id: f
       bus info: usb@2:1
       logical name: eth2
       serial: 34:c8:d6:b1:03:b9
       capabilities: ethernet physical
       configuration: autonegotiation=off broadcast=yes driver=cdc_ncm driverversion=6.1.75-vendor-rk35xx duplex=half firmware=CDC NCM (NO ZLP) link=no multicast=yes port=twisted pair

❯ ethtool eth2
Settings for eth2:
        Supported ports: [  ]
        Supported link modes:   Not reported
        Supported pause frame use: No
        Supports auto-negotiation: No
        Supported FEC modes: Not reported
        Advertised link modes:  Not reported
        Advertised pause frame use: No
        Advertised auto-negotiation: No
        Advertised FEC modes: Not reported
        Speed: 2500Mb/s
        Duplex: Half
        Auto-negotiation: off
        Port: Twisted Pair
        PHYAD: 0
        Transceiver: internal
        MDI-X: Unknown
        Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)
                               drv probe link
        Link detected: yes

The only real issue I noticed is that some driver versions would fall over when doing auto negotiation with a 10GbE interface:

 ethtool ethtool -s eth2 autoneg off speed 5000 duplex full
netlink error: Operation not supported
❯ ethtool -s eth2 autoneg off speed 1000 duplex full
netlink error: Operation not supported

…and this is, well, OK–all things considered. I’ve gone through this kind of dance with just about every variation on Ethernet since 1Mbps coax, and a little bit of weirdness is to be expected with new chipsets.

Performance

Testing this was, as you might expect, somewhat non-trivial. Running iperf3 on two 2.5GbE SBCs plugged into my with the WP-UT5 hanging off a 10GbE SFP plugged into a third SBC worked (but mostly to demonstrate interoperability).

The real issue for me is that for a while I just didn’t have enough machines with faster network ports to test this properly.

I ended up dismantling rogueone, plugging in the WP-NA5000)onto the bare motherboard laying atop my cork desk mat (sadly, I didn’t take pictures of that setup), and confirmed I could do 4.3Gbps (using iperf3) between that and the WP-UT5 adapter plugged into one of my SBCs, but that was a single data point and wasn’t really tenable as a long term test setup.

I also briefly considered testing it on my (which has slower dual 1GbE ports), but that requires installing a specific driver package and I frequently upgrade the OS on it, so I decided against that to avoid possible glitches.

(Without the driver, the NAS completely refused to detect it, of course.)

I able to plug the adapter to my without any issues (either to a 2.5GbE port or to a 10GbE SFP), but trying to saturate the interface without something else on the other side was tricky, and trying to do that with multiple 2.5GbE clients on the other end wasn’t really reliable.

So even though I have been using the adapter for a while on my Mac mini using it against the , I wasn’t really getting past 2.5GbE–which is nice, but not earth-shattering.

But, again, a couple of weeks ago I got the , which actually has dual 10GbE. So once I got running on it (post to come later) I did a little more testing–I was able to get 4.5 to 4.6Gbps sustained traffic with a direct connection to the WP-UT5 on my Mac, which is pretty great.

Thermals

Unlike the 10GbE SFPs I have been using on my switches (which can become painfully hot), the wisdPi Wp-UT5 ran only slightly warm–and that was only really noticeable when unplugging it from my Mac mini after a week’s worth of continuous use.

Conclusion

The WP-UT5 is a great way to quickly upgrade an older machine to 5GbE (especially a laptop), and the plug-and-play experience across Windows and macOS makes it a non-brainer (although I still hope Apple will fix the UI issue).

Linux users may encounter some quirks and variations in performance due to differing kernel support and configuration anomalies, but I think that won’t be a showstopper for most people–it’s more of an artifact of my particular little menagerie of ARM boards.

I expect to be able to put together a permanent, “new old” desktop machine with the WP-NA5000 soon (I just really need to get a roomier case), and I’ll be sure to post about that as well–including a bit more on VLAN support and perhaps even faster Ethernet switches… We’ll see.

Work Hacks

Things are reasonably OK these days, but I thought I’d list a few work hacks that I’ve come to rely on over the years (and that are now a part of my daily routine).

But there’s a couple of caveats. For instance, a lot of these work for me because I happen to use Microsoft 365 (neé Office) for my day to day work. In fact, I can do 95% of my work using the browser-based versions of Office, only resorting to the native apps for fine editing or meetings.

  • A playlist of pop music from the late 80s and early 90s–i.e., the very stuff I listened to when we ganged up to study for college, which always gets me in a productive mood. I use my to run PlexAmp, so there’s no fiddling with a desktop or phone app and associated distractions–it’s an appliance that just works.
  • Saving my files with YYMMDD prefixes, which makes searching for and sharing them on Teams or mail lightning quick - / and you’re done.
  • Switching the wallpaper every 30 minutes, which gives me a visual cue of passing time (and, in Windows, often signals I need to hop onto the next meeting).
  • Using browser tab groups and workspaces (in Edge–feel free to substitute for analogs in your favorite browser) to group working sets of documents and tools–this way I can open “working sets” for each project with a single click, and quickly switch between contexts throughout the day.
  • Taking a walking break–as in, getting out of the house and walking at a constant (preferably brisk) pace for at least 30 minutes without music, podcasts or maybe even a phone (I removed most social media apps from my phone, so I have no issues carrying it around on walks to take pictures).

The last one deserves a note–I used to listen to podcasts when exercising, but they turned out to be either less informative than reading about things or just plain depressing because they reminded me that my current occupation wasn’t fulfilling enough (Oxide and Friends, which is a brilliant podcast I love, was a particularly sore spot because listening to it during workdays reminded me that I wasn’t coding or building stuff).

The Exit

I wish phone cameras had actually improved though
Autumn can be pretty amazing

Notes for November 18-24

There is relatively little of note this week, since work creeped into a couple of evenings and I tend to finish the days too tired to do anything too contrived–plus I’ve been lacking inspiration to write.

Read More...

Annotating Arcane Wallpapers using Azure OpenAI, The Hard Way

To make a long story short, ended yesterday, and during some idle browsing I came across a pretty amazing set of wallpapers that someone generated by taking 4K frames and upscaling to 8K using 4x_BSRGAN–which I promptly downloaded and converted to optimized JPEGs.

Read More...

Xmas Lights

Ole!
It’s a bit early, but that hasn’t stopped anyone.

Notes for November 11-17

I have been taking a bit more care of myself–largely by forcing myself out of the house as much as possible, completely shutting off Teams every now and then (focus time doesn’t prevent people from messaging you, only calling, even if it does mute notifications) and, by and large, getting up (and going to bed) earlier.

Read More...

The Debix Model A

I’m still trying to work my way down the stack of single-board computers I have to review, and the Debix Model A has been queued up for far too long–for a few interesting reasons, and a lot of mundane ones.

Read More...

Notes for November 4-10

Yeah, I skipped a few weeks’ worth of notes, but the gist of things is that I moved , had a grueling first week (wasn’t able to leave the house for breaks), slept through most of Saturday and am still trying to figure out where all my free time went.

Read More...

Proxmox on the FriendlyELEC CM3588 NAS Kit

After my review of the running OpenMediaVault, I spent a little while trying to get it to run with ZFS enabled.

Read More...

My Take On This Week’s Mac Updates

Since I’m without even taking a proper break, I haven’t been able to take part in the blow by blow as Apple “phoned in” the Mac updates this week, but I still have feelings about them.

Read More...

Back to the Grind

As of today, I am back at Microsoft Consulting–or, as it’s known these days, Industry Solutions Delivery, in the role of a Principal Program Architect.

Read More...

Making the Radxa X4 Even Cooler

Back , I went to some trouble to go over its thermal characteristics and how well that massive heatsink worked.

Read More...

The FriendlyELEC CM3588 NVMe NAS Kit

This one took me a long time, and it was actually the third or fourth RK3588 board I got to review–but the timing of its arrival was completely off (it was in the middle of a work crisis) and I had to put it on the back burner for a while.

Read More...

Archives3D Site Map