Tim's Travel, Pinball, and Beer Blog
Another two trucks came into the warehouse today, and one of them had – yes! – The Most Important Device In The Universe on it.
It’s not plugged in, so it might not look like much right now. But trust me – this is truly The Most Important Device In The Universe.
I’ve mentioned that I’ve started working with the Trumbull County Historical Society. I don’t think I’ve mentioned their new project.
John Zabrucki was born in Warren and ran a company called Modern Props that supplied high tech props for science fiction movies. Star Trek, Ghostbusters, Men In Black, etc. He retired last year and donated a few props to the historical society.
11 full truckloads of props.
They’re trying to get a museum going. In the meantime, all of the props need to be cataloged and stored. And guess who volunteered for that?
I’m wielding The Annihilator. No idea what movie it’s from, but when one runs across a box marked simply ‘THE ANNIHILATOR’, one must open said box.
One of my favorite museums – and one of the best collections of American art in the country – is just a few miles from me, the Butler Institute of American Art. I’m a member and go there often. It doesn’t hurt that it’s just around the corner from a favorite brewery, Noble Creature Cask House.
I went there yesterday because one of my favorite artists, Anthony Benedetto, passed away at the age of 96. I understand that he also sang. He’s got a lovely piece there:
While I was there, I looked around. They were having their Midyear Exibition. One of the pictures caught my eye:
It was taken by my next door neighbor. That’s her husband – and my house on the left.
And finally, something only a geek would notice.
It’s a lovely acrylic, but look at the border. Hm. All numbers above 31 and under 127. I’ll bet…
Yup. ASCII for ‘Women’s rights 2022’.
New system has been purchased. Details are here, but basically, it’s a
Ryzen 7 7800X3
Gigagbyte RTX4070TI Windforce OC
Samsung E 2TB 990PRO NVME GEN4 SSD
Gigabyte B650 Gaming X AX D5 ATX
and it’s fast as all hell. It’s got the biggest CPU cooler I have ever seen in my life:
I mean, seriously. I tend to keep old computer parts just to document for posterity. This is an advanced CPU:
(well, an 80286). And this is a big fan:
But that thing? That is a
I’m afraid to get too close to it.
Oh. And rather than going to all the places that Parts Picker suggested, I just went up to Micro Center. And it was $150 cheaper. Support your local computer geeks!
Finally bit the bullet and upgraded my mail server to RHEL 9.2 from CentOS 7. Red Hat’s new ‘development’ licensing for under ten servers makes that a no brainer. Didn’t go too badly! Made me remember things I hadn’t worried about for years, like generating certs and getting Dovecot to work. And I am finally forcing myself to embrace systemd. For very, very small values of ’embrace’. I’m trying to wean myself off of the old commands. Alias is my friend.
[root@kyushu3 tboyer]# service whatever restart
Do not do that, asshole: whatever restart
[root@kyushu3 tboyer]# chkconfig –add whatever
Do not do that, asshole: –add whatever
[root@kyushu3 tboyer]#
I call it my mail server just out of habit. It is no longer my mail server. I have gone over to the dark side and signed up with Google Workspace.
It allows me to still do my wildcard email thing – an email to whatever@timboyer.org will still forward to me. It’s got better spam protection than my homemade spamassassin setup has. And the cost? $6 per month. Which is cheaper than I was paying for my ssl cert!
But I miss waking up and reading logs now. Ah, well. It was time.
Totally gratuitous link to Trumbull County Historical Society. I’ve started to volunteer with them and they need thwir link count bumped up.
Well, they were essential in 1995.
Dual external floppy. Printer. C128. The tech, it does not get any higher.
My sisters tell me that ‘Lumos’ can be used to activate Android and iPhone flashlights, and ‘nox’ will turn it off.
Strangely, it does not work on my iPhone 12. It does, however, work on my Google Home.
OK, so that’s… interesting. But it turns out that Google is also classy:
And TIM said, Let there be light: and there was light. And TIM saw the light, that it was good: and TIM divided the light from the darkness
And then TIM had a BEER, and the BEER was good. See next post.
Fun note: if you have Google Home and you click on either of these, you will get to see them in action.
Should be easy. Red Hat says it’s easy. Why do it?
In December, 2020, Red Hat announced that it was basically discontinuing CentOS. They bought them, and then put them out of business. This was not a huge surprise, since Red Hat did the same thing in 2004 when they created Fedora. But I do not want to run a bleeding edge OS; I want to run something boring. Given where I am right now I might look at migrating to another distro – but not right now.
So what to do? Well, at the same time Red Hat introduced a ‘No-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux Individual Developer Subscription’. This gives you up to 16 servers running RHEL.
And they made it easy to convert, with a convert2rhel utility that will convert your CentOS to a RHEL server. Corey has used it with great success. I, on the other hand, have had less:
root@kyushu2 ~]# ls /sys/firmware/efi
config_table efivars esrt fw_platform_size fw_vendor runtime runtime-map systab vars
[root@kyushu2 ~]# parted /dev/sda
GNU Parted 3.1
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type ‘help’ to view a list of commands.
(parted) p
Model: ATA KINGSTON SHFS37A (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 240GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 211MB 210MB fat16 EFI System Partition boot
2 211MB 1285MB 1074MB xfs
3 1285MB 240GB 239GB lvm
So obviously EFI, right?
[01/07/2022 13:53:54] TASK – [Prepare: Gather system information] ***
Name: CentOS Linux
OS version: 7.9
Architecture: x86_64
Config filename: centos-7-x86_64.cfg
Running the ‘rpm -Va’ command which can take several minutes. It can be disabled by using the –no-rpm-va option.
The ‘rpm -Va’ output has been stored in the /var/log/convert2rhel/rpm_va.log file
[01/07/2022 13:57:20] TASK – [Prepare: Checking the firmware interface type (BIOS/UEFI)]
UEFI detected.
CRITICAL – UEFI: Unable to detect any UEFI bootloader entry.
So… not EFI?
Luckily, I have two of these systems. I’m cloning the SSD drives with dd tonight, and I’ll play around with them tomorrow. If you’ve never done a dd drive clone over the network, it’s amazing.
On the destination server:
nc -l 19000|dd bs=16M of=/dev/sda
On the originating server:
dd bs=16M if=/dev/sda|nc 192.168.42.4 19000
And make sure you turn off firewalld on the receiving server!