I’m trying to keep a log of some of the interesting things that I had to deal with on a day to day basis.
Things done/encountered yesterday:
- Early in the morning Robbie and his mom showed up to get her obitalk device configured. About a week ago we had to go through and clean up her accounts. She couldn’t remember the email addresses that she needed nor the passwords. We had to go through all the accounts recovering the passwords once the accounts were identified. Her gmail account was tied to her yahoo account for password recovery and she didn’t know the names or passwords of either. We recovered those and I made sure she brought a notepad where she could write down the names and passwords of each so when the obitalk came in we could refer to what she wrote down. We also picked up a Google Voice number for her. Normally I never see Google Voice numbers available in our area. We also managed to switch Robbie’s out of state Google Voice number into a local number. Robbie was happy about that. I ordered the obitalk for her. When it arrived I reviewed youtube videos from others having experience with that device. Then I read the instructions that came with the obitalk. Anyway, this prep work allowed me to get it configured and tested quickly. The only issue that we had was that she didn’t bring her cell phone. I like to take pictures of the screen also so as to refer to it later if things need to be adjusted. We used Robbie’s phone instead. I did sort of read her the riot act telling her that she needs to always carry her phone no matter who she is leaving with or where she’s going as it is her lifeline. You know, just in case of a heart attack or accident or some other incident that could impact her. Anyway, aside from having to create an obitalk account which I didn’t like we were able to get it done quickly. I called her later in the day to verify that it worked after she set it up at home.
- Migrated my PiHole from a Raspberry Pi Model B to a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B+. This is a single core 700mhz with 512mb RAM transferred to a quad core 900mhz with 1gb of RAM. The primary purpose was to overcome an issue where the pihole would go offline. The secondary purpose was to give the pihole some extra resources. There were issues, many of them. For instance I had to set the pfsense router to give it the same IP address as the old Pihole hardware (that’s done based on the mac address of the Ethernet port. I also wanted to use an old 4gb sd-card instead wasting the space of a 16gb sd-card. That meant I had to reinstall raspbian lite. Then boot with it on the replacement pi and then run the raspi-config to expand the partition size to the full 4gb capacity and enable ssh. Then ssh in and install the pihole stuff. Then I transferred my old adlists.list from the old pi to the newer one. Things went well, and I updated the adlists within the console of the pihole system.
- I decided to see if all the core i5 desktops that I have could be set to operate with wake on lan (WOL). With WOL I can remotely start the computers if they support WOL and I configure them properly. This required going into the BIOS and turning to power management and enabling power on via pci and pci-e. I had two different OSes to do this one. One was Kubuntu 16.04 and the other was Arch. The way Arch does it is a bit different than Kubuntu being that it doesn’t by default have certain programs installed such as the ethtool program nor do they have WOL features automatically enabled at boot. I had to install and configure those. Also, I noted that ifconfig output shows that the layout of the data is slightly different. The mac address is labeled “ether” rather than “hwaddr” (BTW, the mac address can technically be changed so it isn’t really a hardware address and that’s likely why Arch has it labeled differently). When I did that I tested from my main computer by issuing the wakeonlan command with the mac address. Earlier I went from machine to machine to machine using my phone’s camera to take a photo of the mac addresses so that I could refer to the photos when issuing the command. Four of the machines, three with Arch and 1 with Kubuntu, worked perfectly. My goal was to enable me to shutdown or restart them while ssh’d in from another location.
- The pfsense server software was recently updated. It is now at version 2.3.3. I did that update. I rebooted and all worked well. The way you do that is by going into the web console from a remote computer using your web browser, logging in, and going to the general setup and choosing the update option. I read a number of posts on reddit that said people had various issues. I suspect a new update will occur soon.
- I found a $10 27″ Samsung sync-master s550 at the goodwill. It has an odd power connector and power requirements. I looked and ordered off ebay something that I hope fits. If so I came up with an inexpensive replacement monitor for my main rig.
- I ssh’d into most of my boxes and did updates most of which included an update to the kernel. Also the nvidia kernel loadable module was also updated. So was wine. The kernel is the main part of the OS that enables controlling hardware with software. The nvidia kernel loadable module is the driver for the video card. Wine was updated to 2.2.x I believe. It is used to allow windows programs to run on Linux.
- I switched recently from a rpi2 to an odroid c2 as the media center driving the tv in the front office. I use that to watch shows and youtube videos. After doing that I wanted to start a youtube video yesterday I found that the video wouldn’t start. After some investigation I found that the browser addon that enabled that pointed to the wrong ip address. I corrected that and things worked again. A few days ago I tried it and found that the libreelec software didn’t have the youtube addon.