Posts tagged with "debian"

We have all done it if you work long enough. I blew up my Debian Linux system with an incredibly stupid mistake breaking the whole system. It is actually one of the questions I have when interviewing someone. “What is the worst mistake you’ve ever made?” And if they admit one, the follow up question, “What did you learn?”

I renamed my /usr directory to /usr-root with a mv /usr /usr-root as the root user. I knew I was treading on dangerous ground so I fortunately had two ssh console sessions up and both running as root. The goal was to migrate the /usr to separate storage to recover space for the very full root disk.

My super lean Proxmox 8.3 testbed cluster running Ceph occasionally just decides to lockup a node based on it being incredibly limited on RAM and CPU. As much as I hate rebooting Linux/UNIX systems, this is a case where a nightly reboot of the nodes might help with reliability.

I have been using the Dell Wyse 3040 as awesome little systems for my Tailscale nodes in my multiple joint homelab networks. These systems are super low power consuming and physically small enough to just plug and go. Truly, deploying a WireGuard®-based VPN solution could not be any easier. I have four of these units connecting my homelab networks across three geographically diverse locations.

The Dell Wyse 3040 is a nifty little machine that is extremely small and a low power consumer. They are however not without issues. This is my foray into trying to get a couple of them working on my homelab. I bought a couple in early March 2024 based on watching Apalrd’s videos Dell Wyse 3040 Thin Client Teardown and Installing Proxmox VE 7 on Debian Bullseye with the various Dell Wyse thin clients.

Hajo on the BlackArmor Forums has an older posting about getting Debian Linux 5.0 (Lenny) installed on BA NAS 110/220/4x0. This is not a port that includes the kernel but simply a minimum install that gets the system setup to install binaries out of the Lenny EABI ARM platform. The kernel that comes with the BA NAS is compatible with those binaries. The newer kernel for the Debian 6 or higher is not compatible with the BA NAS. This has some limitations but offers a way to get to some newer software pre-compiled. I don’t want to loose the existing functionality on my test system but the draw to DLNA services is pretty strong right now.

To top it off, Debian has a nicely setup cross-compilation setup documented for people working on non-Intel platforms. This offers a way to compile newer software without killing myself anymore on building the entire compiler and supporting software myself.

The goal has always been to make the NAS device useful and I want to play my movies off it to my TV upstairs so this might be the next thing I play with on the development NAS.