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My FireTV started popping up with a low disk space warning and wouldn’t allow me to make it though playing a full video. This was particularly annoying because I added a 32GB USB stick and moved my apps to it, so all files should be writing to the USB.

I checked, and 5GB or so was on the USB, so it’s being used, however yes.. I was low on disk space.

Luckily, I’m rooted and can use the busybox linux tools:

 /system/xbin/du -sh /

showed that yep, /data was using 5GB of space.

Tracing that a little further using:

/system/xbin/du sh /data/*

Showed that  /data/data/com.amazon.tv.launcher was using 3.9G of space! What?

Insider the launcher directory, the offending file was in /databases. I pulled it open inside and found:

root@android:/data/data/com.amazon.tv.launcher/databases # ls -l
 -rw-rw---- amz_a46 amz_a46 20480 1970-02-27 15:47 cmsapi.db
 -rw-rw---- amz_a46 amz_a46 12824 1970-02-27 15:47 cmsapi.db-journal
 -rw-rw---- amz_a46 amz_a46 3998175232 2017-01-15 16:32 mbcache.db
 -rw------- amz_a46 amz_a46 65536 2017-01-15 16:32 mbcache.db-shm
 -rw------- amz_a46 amz_a46 524288 2017-01-15 16:32 mbcache.db-wal

It appears that the Amazon Launcher cache file is growing out of control. A little research say this has something to do with this version of the firmware, and the file can be safely deleted. It will grow again though, so this is something you’ll just need to do as it happens until you upgrade to a newer firmware.

As a recent upgrade I switched to pfSense as a home router/firewall. In my test lab for pfSense I have an Supermicro X10SDV which has two onboard 10GbE  ports combined with a PCIe Intel X540-T2 dual-port 10GbE NIC, giving me access to 4x 10GbE ports.

Currently the smallest and most affordable 8-port 10GbE switches are still ~$600+ and from what I can tell, loud and power hungry. My goal, in addition to setting up a new router/firewall, was to use this as a low-power 4-port 10GbE switch by simply creating a bridge between the 4x10GbE ports and 1x vmx3 NIC to give the local box 10GbE access. This would allow me to have up to 4 additional devices in my house all on 10Gb.

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After this weekends network card passthrough fail with the EXPI9404PT on VMware 6.0 I was feeling pretty discouraged, so I took a break for a day. I decided to try again today since I have a couple other models of network cards in my currently running lab:

• 1x Intel 82576 ET Quad Port Gigabit Network
• 1x Intel 82575 VT Quad Port Gigabit Network

This was actually pretty inconvenient, as I had to shut down all my VMs, shut down the host, pull the card, add the EXPI9404PT, boot up, and reconfigure all of my vSwitches with the new vmnics. It worked, but it was a step I was certainly hoping to avoid. On the plus side, newer network cards should hopefully be a little more efficient — I read something like 2.5W vs 5.6W. Not earth shattering, but it’s something!

I figured I’d save myself the hassle and start with the higher model card — just seems like I should have better luck, right?

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