closing down blogger

I started to use /blogger/ at a time you hadn't access to all your data on all your devices.
So for some notes I thought is was useful to put these on the net to be able to search for them from every computer.

This worked, only partly. Many notes I've taken where to /chaotic/ even for a blog named this way and only a view I did later polish to be published.

With time the sync between the devices got simpler, USB stick sizes increased and most notes where on the phone anyway. And today all notes are in a git repo that is cloned to all my computer, phone and tablet.

This is the last post here. The posts here and all other I've written in different locations over time will be moved into a git repo. This will be public on Github/Gitlab and /converted/ to there /pages/ to be readable like a blog again.

As this data is on the waybackmachine I don't feel to bad if I delete this account/blog in the future. And the information was only for my own benefit anyway and if someone else found this useful it was unintended 😀

static web page

Jekyll

By far the most used generator.
This needs to install a specific version of Ruby. Read that some peoble on MacOS run into trouble at one point in time. Had similar bad expiriance with Java and perl.
Read here that Liquid templates provide only basic customization. Or you would need to write an own Liquid helper. I’m not into Ruby on the other hand would I change the existing templates that much?

HUGO

This is the number two used generator. But the 3rd Next is realy close.
Followed the example to get it running on my iMac (Homebrew). But after this I didn’t like the documentation. I couldn’t find the things I was looking for.

Nikola

Know about this from Mike Zamansky video 35 Blogging. He switched from Jekyll to Nikola because he is familiar with Python and not Ruby.
The documentation is by far the best of all I looked at.

Template	usage	Jekyll	Hugo	Nikola
Jinja2	19			X
Liquid	12	X
Jade	10
Go Templates	7		X
Mako	4			X

(This table was generaged with Hugo from Markdown. To paste needed to be in HTML)

iTunes cannot read the contents of the iPad

Connected my iPad and got the error message iTunes cannot read the contents of the iPad. The only option was to restore the device.

Searched for the error message and found apple support page with lots of errors and possible solutions. For me Reset the Lockdown folder did the trick.

Disconnected the iPad and closed iTunes. From /var/db/lockdown I removed the plist file that was left over from the last sync. The date gave it away. Connected the iPad again and all worked fine.

start Btrfs with one disk and add second for RAID1 setup

The new file server will contain two 4TB disks as RAID1 and a single 4TB disk for of side backup. All three disks are different to spread the risk of failing at the same time. The RAID disks will be a WD red and a Segate NAS. The backup disk a WD green. Unfortunately the Segate was out of stock.

To test how simple it is to start with only one RAID disk I added two disk to a VM and did all needed steps there. From the starting point off the simple creation to starting the RAID.

To verify this, I created some files on the first disk and compared the hash of the files after the test.

1. create the file system with one disk

[root@centos ~]# mkfs.btrfs -L test_merge_HDs /dev/sdb

SMALL VOLUME: forcing mixed metadata/data groups

WARNING! - Btrfs v3.12 IS EXPERIMENTAL

WARNING! - see http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org before using

Turning ON incompat feature 'mixed-bg': mixed data and metadata block groups

Turning ON incompat feature 'extref': increased hardlink limit per file to 65536

Created a data/metadata chunk of size 8388608

fs created label test_merge_HDs on /dev/sdb

nodesize 4096 leafsize 4096 sectorsize 4096 size 500.00MiB

Btrfs v3.12

[root@centos /]# btrfs fi df /mnt/merge/

System, single: total=4.00MiB, used=4.00KiB

Data+Metadata, single: total=8.00MiB, used=28.00KiB

[root@centos /]# btrfs fi show 

Label: test_merge_HDs  uuid: b5aa052e-b44c-4e80-8e2b-3b7d04eb19e4

Total devices 1 FS bytes used 32.00KiB

devid    1 size 500.00MiB used 12.00MiB path /dev/sdb

Btrfs v3.12

2. add the second disk

[root@centos /]# btrfs device add /dev/sdc /mnt/merge/

SMALL VOLUME: forcing mixed metadata/data groups

[root@centos /]# btrfs fi df /mnt/merge/

System, single: total=4.00MiB, used=4.00KiB

Data+Metadata, single: total=8.00MiB, used=28.00KiB

[root@centos /]# btrfs fi show 

Label: test_merge_HDs  uuid: b5aa052e-b44c-4e80-8e2b-3b7d04eb19e4

Total devices 2 FS bytes used 32.00KiB

devid    1 size 500.00MiB used 12.00MiB path /dev/sdb

devid    2 size 500.00MiB used 0.00 path /dev/sdc

Btrfs v3.12

3. start the RAID

[root@centos /]# btrfs balance start -dconvert=raid1 -mconvert=raid1 /mnt/merge/

Done, had to relocate 2 out of 2 chunks

[root@centos /]# btrfs fi df /mnt/merge/

System, RAID1: total=32.00MiB, used=4.00KiB

Data+Metadata, RAID1: total=112.00MiB, used=100.00KiB

[root@centos /]# btrfs fi show 

Label: test_merge_HDs  uuid: b5aa052e-b44c-4e80-8e2b-3b7d04eb19e4

Total devices 2 FS bytes used 104.00KiB

devid    1 size 500.00MiB used 144.00MiB path /dev/sdb

devid    2 size 500.00MiB used 144.00MiB path /dev/sdc

Btrfs v3.12

new file server with Btrfs

It's time to update my file server. The last time I decided to use a modern file filesystem - ZFS. As there was no real Linux support I played with it on FreeBSD. But the best support at the time was in Sun's Solaris of corse. As I didn't know both system very well I choose OpenSolaris. Unfortunately this was one of the looser of the Sun acquisition.

The next time, I decided, every thing should be better. Lets see.

My knowledge of BSD isn't better as five years ago. Therefore my first decision is to stick with what I know - Linux. As the ZFS support is not really better I will use the Linux version of the modern filesystem - Btrfs. It is still marked as unstable, but some Linux distribution, including Oracle, changed the status from experimental to production. And in my case, where I use basic features only, there shouldn't be any problem.

As a Linux distribution I choose CentOS over Debian.  The long term support is better (longer) and I administrated RHEL machines at work for around 3 years. And as a desktop system I use Fedora for quite some time and impressed me with the SELinux integration. Therefore I don't expect any surprises.