Changes, changes...

Datum
zondag, 4 juli 2021
Body

Notable changes...

  1. Until recently I did my computer work from behind a laptop. That was one with rather solid specs, bought from my mother's inheritance, which came into the house in early 2016. But that laptop was getting a bit worn out... Everything still worked fine and pretty fast, except for the fan. Sounds regularly came from the laptop as if it had been transformed into a purring cat. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but it is a symptom of an approaching end. Purring fan becomes stalled fan one day and that can lead to a melted CPU or worse. I experienced that once, a very long time ago, with a desktop pc, which I was only able to save by putting the CPU (to give an impression of how long ago: it was a 386sx...) in a freezer for a while. and install another fan. But installing fans in a laptop is a completely different kind of job. So there was reason to look for something else.
    Fortunately, you can now get a lot more computer for your money than five years ago. After some browsing on Amazon, I choose a mini PC from the Chinese brand Chuwi. Has 8 GB RAM and a 250 GB SSD. I added a 250 GB HDD lying here. I took the monitor and keyboard that are still standing here from the computer cabinet (they only worked when I had to be on the home server, and it usually runs without any problems) and they are now on my workplace. Everything that was on the laptop has been backed up to the home server, so I can now do the same as before, just on different hardware. The laptop is going to go to the municipal waste disposal soon, but I want to take it apart first to see if anything can be salvaged from it. The SSD for example or the HDD or maybe the RAM. I can boot my new desktop in Windows 10, Kubuntu 20.04, or Chrome OS. Best of all worlds!
     
  2. Our ISP, Robohost, has been taken over by Vimexx. As a result, the IP addresses of our websites were changed quite unnoticed. And that meant that I couldn't reach anything for a while... I panicked for a while because no matter what I did... In the end, the solution turned out to be quite simple: just think carefully, and everything worked again! Huh? What do you mean? Well, just flush the IP addresses, both in Windows and in the Chrome web browser. And everything worked again.
    But this acquisition means that a migration is in the pipeline! Currently, the websites are hosted on a VPS in Germany, and I only use Vimexx as a registrar and for its DNS. In the near future, I will combine those functions again and everything will be placed with Vimexx. I once left Robohost with the sites because I needed SSH hosting and Vimexx has that option.
    Undoubtedly to be continued!
     
  3. Our home server had been running Ubuntu 20:04 LTS for some time. And that went fine. But that state was reached by upgrading the previous version. That works well, but it also results in pollution. And then it can happen that vague error messages occur. Fatal errors, while everything seems to work. That's why I chose to reinstall the OS. In itself that is fine, because all data is installed on a ZFS running RAID of 3 x 6 TB. It is then again a matter of figuring out how to activate a ZFS-RAID, but Google will help with that. Everything is now running as before. I only need to tinker with Transmission. You learn from that every time because you realize more and more which data you need to have accessible in a backup. Special space has been reserved for this in the backups partition on the SSD, which is not overwritten during the installation of the OS.
    Serviio and Samba run just fine.
    Always think carefully about the Firewall, otherwise, you can continue to get upset about a non-working Samba, while the solution is very simple...

All things considered, quite a few things have happened, but it all landed on its feet. Where's the champagne?

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