Adventures in Computer Maintenance: Out With the Old, In With the Error Messages

The Home Assistant is humming along smoothly at this point, probably because I haven't actually tried to do a whole lot with it in terms of extending functionality, increasing it, or writing new functions for it to achieve. It's behaving stably, for the moment, even as we keep everything updated and fix issues when they come up, like when the robot vacuum changed its IP address by one from the DHCP assignment and it took me weeks to figure out what the problem was. So this edition of Adventures in Computer Stuff is a lot about fixing and errors and using librarian skills to find solutions to those errors.

( Adventures in Error Correction and Workarounds )

So, once again, we have managed to make computers work and do what we want them to, mostly through the skills of search and persistence and finding a workaround when the direct method doesn't work. Not because of superior technical prowess or any of the skills where I would be able to directly understand what went wrong and know what commands to run immediately to confirm the issue or fix it. It's why having machines that you can play around with is vital to your learning, because then you have the freedom to try solutions and restore from backups if those solutions make a bigger mess than they had before. And you learn a little bit more about how the systems work every time that you succeed, and sometimes more every time that you fail. Have fun, everyone!