Everything Broke

#SelfHosting #Failure

The M600 died. It was working fine until…it wasn’t.

I tried everything I or Claude could think of but just couldn’t recover the thing. No POST, no graphics, no nothing. Quite a bummer. That was my ‘always on’ docker host for a pihole, this website, the 1kb site, Tailscale gateway, SyncThing introducer and a family minecraft server. Probably some other things. Anyway, quite the bummer.

Fortunately, the SSD in it was just fine. I copied /home to another machine and am slowly migrating things over as necessary.

This website and 1kb are currently Cloudflare pages. It was just easier. And now there are zero ports open on my firewall. Previously 80 and 443 were open for the 1kb site. Maybe that was the problem.

Anyway, many learnings have occurred since the last post here! Maybe I’ll actually blog some more to talk about it. Mostly I wanted to regain the capability to build / publish this.

OpenWebRX Improvements

If you haven’t checked out my OpenWebRX+ in a while, please do! I added a new VHF/UHF antenna, a preamp, splitter, and third SDR. It hears much better now, though I hope to make some more improvements.

Rdio

I’ve also (usually) got an rdio server running, if you’re into that kind of thing. It’s currently receiving the Jacksonville AWIN site. The machine feeding it runs SDRTrunk and should be upgraded soon.

New Laptop

The StarLite kinda died. Really more degraded. I packed it in a backpack with way too many other things and it must have had too much pressure on the lid. Now there’s a dark spot in the bottom / middle of the screen. Totally usable but irritating. Bummer.

I did try chasing down a new screen from Star Labs. Their support was (as always) super cool, but I was going to have to replace both the screen and motherboard, which would become a bit expensive for an old, slow lappy.

I was fortunate to find a gently used ThinkPad X13 gen2 on eBay. It deserves its own ‘last review’ post. I’m very happy with this laptop and hope it hangs in as long as the x230 (which is currently hosting SDRTrunk) has.

SatDump

I’m enjoying learning SatDump. That’ll need its own post once I have something useful to say about it. I was actually trying the 2.0 alpha build just now and hoped to add a photo from the decode to this post but…it didn’t go well. More learnings needed.

That’s about it

There’s been other nerd stuff. Maybe I’ll post about those soon. Greywolf (and APRS in general), Meshtastic stuff, balloons. OH and I’m rebuilding a bicycle. And now to try the make / post pipeline and see if this still works!

73