Where did the day go? Down the rabbit hole of SysAdmin work and so, while not particularly wasted, wasn’t time well spent.
It started when I decided to upgrade my server to Fedora 30, surprisingly enough, that went smoothly, took a coffee break and a lunch hour and everything came up smelling like a rose. I was due after last summer on the cosmic break board.
While that was going on was going on I decided to post a blog entry and that was when I went down the rabbit hole. First I updated all the blogs and then turned to the article and started by heading off to download an infographic from a link I was emailed, but as it was a tracker, it was blocked by my Pi-hole. I attempted to temporarily disable the pihole and found I could not login via the web interface. Using SSH, I was able to determine I had run out of storage space…but why?
I tracked it back to using the version of software, NOOBS that came with it. Lazy and as a result the 8GB card had only 5GB of storage and it was full with the base install. I certainly could have simply deleted a few of the apps (Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha being the largest unused apps I generally pull off) but as it is a rainy day, I optimistically put off gardening to between showers, little sensing how long this was going to take to put a clean copy of Raspbian on it.
It went very slowly, I forgot why I like to pull of those apps, and that old memory card is left to a slow older standalong Pi duties like Pi-hole, the update took forever but eventually I was rewarded with a reloaded from scratch Pi-Hole with plenty of space.
Now I was ready to make a blog entry and be quick about it as the update to Fedora 30, which takes at least a coffee break and full lunch to complete was already done. Except the Pi I used for the Pi-Hole to update wasn’t starting the HDMI. Aha I thought, the old HDMI recognition issue I thought, and sure enough the /boot/config.txt file was mangled slightly with a comment that NOOBS had made changes, argh, I might as well reload this one as the rain continued and so I did. It turned out that my new Pi case with a fan and everything has simply been reluctant to let the HDMI cable go all the way in and by the time I solved that I had updates going everywhere.
So after all of that, I don’t have time to post the entry to the blog, didn’t get any gardening done, didn’t get to read a little, and I am back to where I was at the start of the day although up to date in a maintainable fashion.
I suppose it is worth it; however, I have found that my view has completely changed. I no longer think it reasonable to spend time on System Administration, life is too short.
Hmmmm.
