Stevan @withaveeay@mastodon.social

In these days, a necessary reminder of the White Rose movement, a group of young people who saw what was happening in front of everyone's eyes, and acted, while their elders did not. https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nazi-germany/the-white-rose-movement/

Good grief. systemd doesn't half make the system work hard just for a simple cron job.
Obviously the days when cron just fired up the task and finished without fuss somehow lacked "progress" and now we need systemd to do a system stress test for every cron job.
😩

Getting there with the project to migrate the home-based Raspberry Pi server from Raspbian to btrfs-based @opensuse
Just completed a DR test, rebuilding the system from a backup. A few loose ends now - I still can't get mailgraph to work, and then the final go-live crossover to plan. It's been fun.
https://www.vasten.co.uk/blog/index.php?post/74/OpenSUSE-as-a-Raspberry-Pi-4-Server

Stoer Bay, this morning
#Assynt #ScotlandInEU

(By the way, this was a phone pic on my cheapie Cubot phone, using OpenCamera's HDR mode. As you can see it was straight into the rising sun, and the real-world contrast was extreme, so the software's done well.)

Low tide, and it's hard to imagine that in a few hours, 5 metres of water will be above our heads

The little servants of St Bride, on all their delight

High tide / low tide
Today

If anyone fancies running the Omeka digital collections system under Lighttpd, I have an incantation that works (for em, anyway) documented here.
https://www.vasten.co.uk/blog/index.php?post/75/Omeka-under-Lighttpd

We run a few Raspberry Pis as servers. I'm looking at moving from Raspbian to OpenSUSE as the OS for the main server, & documenting in a "the story so far" way my findings here:
https://www.vasten.co.uk/blog/index.php?post/74/OpenSUSE-as-a-Raspberry-Pi-4-Server
The plan is, if the new disk arrives this week, to do the migration next weekend. Still to do: disk migrations & DR simulations with btrfs (new to me), final touches to the email stack & getting mailgraph working.
It's been fun so far.
Getting nervous, so comments on this plan welcome.

On this morning's walk

I'm also enjoying OpenSUSE on Raspberry Pi. I have two systems, both Leap 15.2, one on RPi 4 and the other Rpi3. They're amazingly fast, and they seem to enjoy btrfs. Am unplugging them rudely every now and again to see how btrfs recovers. So far so good. My plan to is migrate my Raspbian home server to OpenSUSE at some stage. Very impressed with the performance of Nextcloud on OpenSUSE aarm64.

I have made The Change.
My @opensuse laptop now runs fully on btrfs.
I'm not using advanced features, perhaps won't even bother with snapshots, but still, I am nervous. While I have not used btrfs extensively before now, the only Linux filesystem I have used for years with no issues is jfs, which is now poorly supported by OpenSUSE. I have lost data with ext[2-4], xfs and reiserfs.

Morning walk. Stoer Beach at low tide, while a snow shower goes through beyond Meal Dearg.

One criticism of openSUSE on Pi I saw spoke bout how slow it was to boot. This is true, but it's because grub is set to a 10s timeout. Change that in yast and it boots quite quickly enough.
I should add I'm running this as a headless server, not a desktop (although my laptop is also openSUSE, but on Ryzen)
There's always been something solid and encouraging about openSUSE and it seems just the same on Pi hardware

Quite enjoying diving deeply into OpenSUSE Leap on Raspberry Pi 4. As an exercise, I've changed the root filesystem to XFS and then to BTRFS, swapped out media, and generally stress tested it.
Can't believe the speed of Nextcloud/php-fpm/postgresql combo running on a BTRFS SSD via USB in comparison with my in-production Raspbian system.

Raspberry Pi Foundation response to their secretly & silently on RaspberryPiOS installing a Microsoft repo & gpg key:
"Thank you, everyone, for your feedback, this won't be changing because it makes the first experience for people who do want to use tools such as VSCode easier."
So for the benefit of a minor subset of Pi users who should know how to add a repo, all Raspbian gets this repo planted.
What will the Pi Foundation silently install next?
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=301011&p=1810728#p1810728

Just did an update to a Pi that hasn't had an update for a while. That MS repo was installed, but I can't see what did it. I can understand some MS-centric developers wanting this, but installing it silently on every Raspberry PiOS based systems seems a concern

This is worrying:
http://techrights.org/2021/02/02/microsoft-pi/
I checked one of my Pi's, and sure enough, I found the referenced repo point to microsoft.com.
I hope the Raspberry Pi foundation explain what and why this is being pushed out plausibly and hopefully with an apology.