Pete's Log: Esgerbeastie Mark III and Other Shenanigans

Entry #2527, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff, Home Automation, Homeownership, Life in General)
(posted when I was 45 years old.)

Three things happened:

  • It is finally time to stop running Debian testing
  • My boot SSD has twice generated worrisome alerts of recent
  • M.2 SSDs were on sale at Micro Center this past weekend

Thus Esgerbeastie is now running a fresh install of Debian Stable (a.k.a. Bookworm) on a new SSD. Everything is looking as it should (i.e. my Sway config carried over fine and my terminal font is Comic Code—i've been using Comic Code for more than a year now and gosh do I love this font).

Esgerbeastie has two ethernet interfaces. One on the "main" VLAN and one on the home automation VLAN. So via that second interface I can do a variety of home automation things without opening a bunch of ports between the two VLANs. Probably pointless but it's the sort of thing that makes me happy. But anyway, the way I made all that work in the past involved disabling NetworkManager and enabling systemd-networkd. Noting that here in case the topic comes up again.

The only concern is that making the M.2 SSD bootable involved switching my motherboard to UEFI. Which in turn made my existing OS's unbootable. I'm not concerned about my previous Debian install but we shall see if I can get by without Windows. It's been some time since I booted Windows, but really what I need to figure out is if I can get StarCraft II working in Wine.

I've been doing some maintenance on the pi cluster and finally added the pi Jamie bought me for my birthday. This was mostly working well except a few days after adding the new pi, Kubernetes decided to migrate the nginx ingress pod to the new pi and somehow external connectivity to all HTTP/HTTPS services is now not working. I could work around things by either draining the new node or just tying nginx explicitly to one of the other nodes. If I do that, though, I'll probably never resolve the root issue. So I continue to poke at it from time to time.

We called a different garage guy this morning, since the last people we called no-showed and this guy came by this afternoon and gave us a temporary fix while he orders a new spring. Feeling pleased with him so far.