Entries tagged pi

Software

I've been using redis for a while now. It is a fast in-memory storage system which offers persistence (unlike memcached), as well as several primitive data-types such as lists & hashes.

Anyway it crossed my mind that I don't have a backup of the data it contains, so I knocked up a simple script to dump the contents in plain-text:

• redis-dump

In other software-news I've had some interesting and useful feedback and made two new releases of my slaughter sysadmin tool - it now contains a wee test suite and more robustness.

Hardware

I received an email last night to say that my Raspberry PI has shipped. Ordered 24/05/2012, and dispatched 12/10/2012 - I'd almost forgotten about it.

My plan is to make it a media-serving machine, SNES emulator, or similar. Not 100% decided yet.

Finally I've taken the time to repaint my office. When I last wrote about working from home I didn't include pictures - I just described the process of using a "work computer" and a "personal computer".

So this is what my office used to look like. As you can see there are two machines and a huge desk.

With a few changes I now have an office which looks like this - the two machines are glued-together with a KVM. and I have much more room behind it for another desk, more books, and similar toys. Additionally my dedication is now enforced - I simply cannot play with both computer as the same time.

The chair was used to mount the picture - usually I sit on a kneeling chair, which is almost visible.

What inspired the painting? Partly the need for more space, but mostly water damage. I had a leaking ceiling. (Local people will know all about my horrible leaking roof situation).

The end?

Tags: pi, raspberry pi, redis, slaughter | 3 comments

I've now completed all my KVM migrations. Moving my personal virtual machines from one host to another.

There were a few niggles, for example I didn't have a working IPv6 allocation at the time I moved things so I had to set that up post-migration.

I've also joined each of the hosts into a VPN which makes cross-guest communication secure and simple.

Finally I've overhauled my firewalls and service lists.

I installed a couple of extra guests, using libvirt and booting from the Debian ISO. The Debian installer continues to impress, though it did make me think I should overhaul my PXE setup at home.

It wouldn't be hard to have a Raspberry PI running as a TFTP + DHCP server. You could plug it into a network, reboot your desktop, and then have it boot into the imager. At the moment I run DHCP + TFTPD + etc on my main desktop, and that allows me to reimage any of the hosts in the flat easily, except itself obviously.

The last time I reinstalled this system I had to reconfigure DHCP + PXE + TFTP on another host. I think the next time I need to reinstall any system I'll "waste" an SD-card on an image-server host.

Finally I've recently read the Rick Cook Wizardy Series:

• Geeky developer gets transferred to a typical fantasy land:
  • Where magic works/exists.
  • There are dragons.
  • He writes a magic-compiler using FORTH to build primitives into bigger spells.

Fun idea. Horrible puns. Some of the books were too long, or left plot elements dangling, but on average they were more good than bad. Albeit a little predictable and "simple".

Tags: kvm, pi, random | No comments