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silveradeptThese things are not actually related to Home Automation, but they are the kinds of things where someone has looked at me and said explicitly, "I think you are one of those computer touchers," the implication being that even if I still don't think of myself as someone who has an extraordinary amount of technological knowledge (because there's still a mental block in there that using a recipe is not cooking, despite the point of libraries and scripts being there so you don't have to construct everything from scratch,) there are still things that I am doing that other people would possibly gesture and flail about.
Like thanking my past self for having set up the routing on a desktop machine so that when I needed to upgrade the Pi-Hole to the newest version of Raspberry Pi OS, and tanking all wireless access in the process, the wired desktop machine was able to keep finding the Internet so it could download the image and flash it to the card. Once the Pi-Hole was reinstalled and imported again, wireless came back for the machine that actually had a built-in reader. I don't know why the one worked and the other didn't, and I should probably figure out the why on it because I do want the wireless to work if the Pi-Hole should fail. Or keep up a set of instructions that will reverse the Pi-Hole router settings so that DNS still works when the Pi-Hole is temporarily offline for version upgrades, and then re-do the instructions to make the Pi-Hole the primary DNS for everything. This will probably change, because the current router is likely going to be replaced, since it has entered the manufacturer's end of life era, and the people maintaining the current aftermarket firmware for it have said they will stop releasing updates for this router at the end of the year. So I'll get to learn how to make this work with an entirely new router. This does not fill me with terror, which is probably one of those signs that I may have more skill than I think I do with technological things. Or, at the very least, more confidence that I can do things and recover from weird situations when they arise.
The other thing I ended up doing, by accident, was destroying important things while other important things were running on my primary laptop, the converted Chromebook, and that caused GRUB to be unable to find the kernel and boot it. Ooops. The good thing was that the partitions themselves were intact, and the kernel images were there, but the GRUB configuration did not find or load them. So I booted up a rescue unit that provided a chroot for me to work with, tried reinstalling the packages, which didn't fix the problem, and eventually did enough research (reading web pages) to figure out the grub command prompt lines to use to get GRUB to specifically boot the kernel and get back into my own install, which was good, although I knew it would be temporary. But once I was in there, I was also able to consult the Arch Wiki and use the correct commands present there to reinstall GRUB and have it find what was already there. Once I did that, everything booted again, as if I hadn't done anything at all, and the system has remained stable. And now I know not to mess with the cache when there are updates going on. But also, finding out what had gone wrong, rustling up the commands needed to first boot and then reinstall GRUB to find everything again, and having tried to fix things from the chroot are probably all things that other people look at me and wonder what kind of arcane magic I performed to make this work, or even to conceive of how to find out what the problem was and then to further be able to fix it by following other people's recipes. Being comfortable with command line operations probably helps a lot, since a lot of those tools and fixes required the command line to achieve effectively.
There's a certain amount of command line evangelism that happens when you start using a Linux, and some people suggest that people should start by using command-line tools and then eventually progress to a GUI with a desktop environment or a window manager. For people whose first experiences are with command lines (like me), it seems a logical choice to have other people learn the system in the same manner, especially with the amount of power and speed that command line tools can provide. And that an awful lot of utilities are still built only with the command line, and their GUI counterparts are really mostly visual dressing on those command lines. For people who have not had the experience of memorizing and repeating commands on the line, and whose primary way of interacting with a computer has been visual and GUI-driven, making them learn the command line first is silly. Furthermore, a well-designed GUI makes a lot of tasks easy and closer to intuitive, which lowers the entry cost of using a Linux. (Which is an admirable and correct goal. Gatekeeping people who don't have a certain amount of technical ept is silly and it keeps them in places that they may not want to be.)
So, yeah. Apparently, I'm still doing things with my machines that are foolish and require repairing, but I'm also managing to diagnose the problems and find solutions to them. And also, I successfully shepherded all of the tiny machines that were on RPi OS up to the next major version, so hopefully that will hold fast for a year or two until we need to jump again. Setting things up again after these version jumps is an annoyance, but it all moved relatively quickly, so not a major annoyance. And the tools and scripts that other people have provided mean being able to get back to the previous state fairly quickly. It's cooking, it really is, and those scripts are literally there to help make the process work and get people with a functioning device. Using them is the intended way of installing things, just like recipes are there to help you made food in an intended way, and knowing what they're supposed to do, and what you can do to save a dish that might not be going according to plan, is part of having cooking skills. If I keep telling myself that being able to use things, and being able to fix problems when they appear, is valid computer skills, and being able to follow recipes to make delicious food, and occasionally experiment or save things that might be going weird is part of cooking things, at some point I might believe it.
(Postscript: Primary laptop/repurposed Chromebook's battery gave out. I managed to diagnose that within a few minutes, since the thing was still plugged in but not turning on and none of the lights indicating battery charge or a charging battery were on. Popped off the bottom, disconnected the battery, re-applied plug-in power, and things booted up just fine. So I ordered a new battery. We'll see if it comes with all the necessary connection components, of course, but that was probably a lot of worry saved by just knowing what the most likely outcome was and testing that. Computer toucher I may yet be. And that's before I do things like boot people's Macs into recovery mode so that I can change the password to log in with and then from there change the necessary passwords for their associated accounts. Yes, I probably do things that other librarians don't know how to, but using one's power for good and not evil, right?)
Like thanking my past self for having set up the routing on a desktop machine so that when I needed to upgrade the Pi-Hole to the newest version of Raspberry Pi OS, and tanking all wireless access in the process, the wired desktop machine was able to keep finding the Internet so it could download the image and flash it to the card. Once the Pi-Hole was reinstalled and imported again, wireless came back for the machine that actually had a built-in reader. I don't know why the one worked and the other didn't, and I should probably figure out the why on it because I do want the wireless to work if the Pi-Hole should fail. Or keep up a set of instructions that will reverse the Pi-Hole router settings so that DNS still works when the Pi-Hole is temporarily offline for version upgrades, and then re-do the instructions to make the Pi-Hole the primary DNS for everything. This will probably change, because the current router is likely going to be replaced, since it has entered the manufacturer's end of life era, and the people maintaining the current aftermarket firmware for it have said they will stop releasing updates for this router at the end of the year. So I'll get to learn how to make this work with an entirely new router. This does not fill me with terror, which is probably one of those signs that I may have more skill than I think I do with technological things. Or, at the very least, more confidence that I can do things and recover from weird situations when they arise.
The other thing I ended up doing, by accident, was destroying important things while other important things were running on my primary laptop, the converted Chromebook, and that caused GRUB to be unable to find the kernel and boot it. Ooops. The good thing was that the partitions themselves were intact, and the kernel images were there, but the GRUB configuration did not find or load them. So I booted up a rescue unit that provided a chroot for me to work with, tried reinstalling the packages, which didn't fix the problem, and eventually did enough research (reading web pages) to figure out the grub command prompt lines to use to get GRUB to specifically boot the kernel and get back into my own install, which was good, although I knew it would be temporary. But once I was in there, I was also able to consult the Arch Wiki and use the correct commands present there to reinstall GRUB and have it find what was already there. Once I did that, everything booted again, as if I hadn't done anything at all, and the system has remained stable. And now I know not to mess with the cache when there are updates going on. But also, finding out what had gone wrong, rustling up the commands needed to first boot and then reinstall GRUB to find everything again, and having tried to fix things from the chroot are probably all things that other people look at me and wonder what kind of arcane magic I performed to make this work, or even to conceive of how to find out what the problem was and then to further be able to fix it by following other people's recipes. Being comfortable with command line operations probably helps a lot, since a lot of those tools and fixes required the command line to achieve effectively.
There's a certain amount of command line evangelism that happens when you start using a Linux, and some people suggest that people should start by using command-line tools and then eventually progress to a GUI with a desktop environment or a window manager. For people whose first experiences are with command lines (like me), it seems a logical choice to have other people learn the system in the same manner, especially with the amount of power and speed that command line tools can provide. And that an awful lot of utilities are still built only with the command line, and their GUI counterparts are really mostly visual dressing on those command lines. For people who have not had the experience of memorizing and repeating commands on the line, and whose primary way of interacting with a computer has been visual and GUI-driven, making them learn the command line first is silly. Furthermore, a well-designed GUI makes a lot of tasks easy and closer to intuitive, which lowers the entry cost of using a Linux. (Which is an admirable and correct goal. Gatekeeping people who don't have a certain amount of technical ept is silly and it keeps them in places that they may not want to be.)
So, yeah. Apparently, I'm still doing things with my machines that are foolish and require repairing, but I'm also managing to diagnose the problems and find solutions to them. And also, I successfully shepherded all of the tiny machines that were on RPi OS up to the next major version, so hopefully that will hold fast for a year or two until we need to jump again. Setting things up again after these version jumps is an annoyance, but it all moved relatively quickly, so not a major annoyance. And the tools and scripts that other people have provided mean being able to get back to the previous state fairly quickly. It's cooking, it really is, and those scripts are literally there to help make the process work and get people with a functioning device. Using them is the intended way of installing things, just like recipes are there to help you made food in an intended way, and knowing what they're supposed to do, and what you can do to save a dish that might not be going according to plan, is part of having cooking skills. If I keep telling myself that being able to use things, and being able to fix problems when they appear, is valid computer skills, and being able to follow recipes to make delicious food, and occasionally experiment or save things that might be going weird is part of cooking things, at some point I might believe it.
(Postscript: Primary laptop/repurposed Chromebook's battery gave out. I managed to diagnose that within a few minutes, since the thing was still plugged in but not turning on and none of the lights indicating battery charge or a charging battery were on. Popped off the bottom, disconnected the battery, re-applied plug-in power, and things booted up just fine. So I ordered a new battery. We'll see if it comes with all the necessary connection components, of course, but that was probably a lot of worry saved by just knowing what the most likely outcome was and testing that. Computer toucher I may yet be. And that's before I do things like boot people's Macs into recovery mode so that I can change the password to log in with and then from there change the necessary passwords for their associated accounts. Yes, I probably do things that other librarians don't know how to, but using one's power for good and not evil, right?)
no subject
Date: 2024-08-16 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-08-16 02:57 am (UTC)Yep!