OpenBSD upgrade and fall things.
friday, october 20th, 2023.
Hello again from the void of not-touching-my-computer-for-a-while! I return, fresh off an upgrade of my Raspberry Pi server to the newly released OpenBSD 7.4. I'm a little sad to see my 186 days of uptime go away, but it's for the best!
Every time I upgrade jellypotamus, it's an opportunity to back up my microSD card in the event of catastrophic failure. Raspberry Pi servers are pretty notorious for corrupting their SD cards, although that really depends on a lot of things: the microSD card firmware, the quality of the actual flash storage ICs, and how the operating system handles flash storage devices (write cycles, caching, chunking, et cetera). Knock on wood, I haven't had a problem with my Raspberry Pi's microSD card yet.
This time, I used my Manjaro Linux install to do the honors of making the
backup. After a little trouble mounting the USB adapter, I was able to
clone the 128GB SD card to a ~2GB backup image with dd:
dd if=/dev/sdb status=progress | zstd > backup_2023_10_20.dd.zst
It did take almost two hours to block copy all those zeroes over USB to Zstandard and then the host machine's storage at a rate of about 18.8 MB/s. Not sure which part of that chain was the bottleneck, but ~40% of my available CPU cycles were kept busy in the process spread over 4 cores.
Once jellypotamus' disk got backed up, I brought it back online and ran
sysupgrade following the instructions. A tense couple of minutes
followed where I wasn't able to SSH into the machine after it rebooted, until I
remembered that OpenBSD doesn't actually trigger the Raspberry Pi's system
reset. A good old-fashioned power cycle brought it back up and answering the SSH
phone, a sysmerge and pkg-add -u and voilà! OpenBSD 7.4 is live!
and the fall things!
Last weekend, we got to spend a few days with our friends at Atlanta Pride. That Friday was a bit rainy, so we skipped the Saturday in the park since the grounds were sure to be muddy and shopped around Little Five Points, then made our way to a gaming cafe for food and Cards Against Humanity. Sunday, of course, was the parade & march. It's one of those things that gives me comfort, seeing all of the like-minded folks celebrating— but it also gives me pause. I am acutely aware of both the necessary security detail and the rainbow capitalism on display. Plenty of "brands" and companies advertising including Home Depot, known for donating to anti-gay politicians. But, on the whole I enjoyed spending time with our friends.
Spooky season is here! We bought some costumes at a local costume shop and have been putting them to good use at local Halloween festivities. The little one is going to have so much candy amassed by the time Halloween has passed. Our neighborhood is thoroughly decorated with spooky things and it really makes my heart happy.
We kinda put our Halloween horror movie marathon on hold for a bit, but got back to it the night before last with Jordan Peele's Get Out. I didn't know what we were getting into, but wow did that movie ever knock our socks off. I think it might actually be my favorite horror movie thus far. Peele did such a good job playing with tropes and expectations— I just can't heap enough praise on it!
Aside from all of that, I've really been enjoying not being on my computer much at all. Work has kept me plenty busy, and I've been enjoying playing Pinball FX on my Switch and reading Theft of Swords. We'll probably go ahead and get our Christmas gifts put together in November before the commercial Christmas season gets in full force so we can relax and just enjoy living in the holiday season. All the cozy indoor vibes, please!
I suppose that's all for now! Until next time, be well. :)