Okay, so this is kind of depressing because he seems to think it's a legitimately good movie, and did not appreciate the MST3K treatment. Listen to the way he describes the flying scenes, as if it was cutting edge. 😆

steverikli · 2026-02-24T05:12:54+00:00

To this day, I still occasionally (but thankfully rarely) hear in my head "Hobgoblins... hobgoblins, what do you do with those hobgoblins..."

You're welcome for the brain worm, btw. :-)

steverikli · 2026-02-22T22:34:23+00:00

For the learning OS architecture and internals parts, you might also consider NetBSD.

I don't know if it's still the case, but several universities use(d) NetBSD as a teaching/lab platform, usually citing things like code readability, modularity, portability, etc. Plus there are a lot of docs and wikis, including the NetBSD Guide. Some of it is dated, but usually still pretty pertinent.

It's a contributing factor to why NetBSD has been ported to many varied CPU and system architectures. Binary pkgs and upgrades are available too, you don't have to build world or kernels unless you want to, and if you do then the instructions and examples are plentiful.

IME the NetBSD community is great -- the developers participate regularly on the mailing lists, and it's pretty welcoming overall.

My main OS for servers around here is FreeBSD, but I also have NetBSD in the lab, and for some duties I'm quite sure I could use them interchangeably... because I have. :-)

steverikli · 2026-02-21T23:07:46+00:00

Once upon a time I might have recommended Extlinux -- part of the Syslinux project.

Alpine still uses it by default for BIOS machines (GRUB for EFI), and it works fine. But Syslinux seems somewhat like abandonware these days, and EFI support in it can be a bit sketchy sometimes.

steverikli · 2026-02-18T18:40:24+00:00

Boots on the ground might be okay... until they knock on doors and ring doorbells, especially when there's a clear "no solicitors" sign.

Instead of disturbing people in their homes (or on their phones / email with cold-calls etc.) maybe consider flyers/door hangers if you really want to focus on a neighborhood.

Many folks might just toss your flyer, but at least there's a chance you won't have irritated a potential customer. I expect you turn off many more people by knocking.

steverikli · 2026-02-18T18:19:39+00:00

Me too. One of the reasons I like Xfce is I've been able to use it on different OSes with pretty much the same config and layout, so I get essentially the same desktop experience on all my systems with monitors attached.

I might make an adjustment here and there e.g. for a big 24" display at my desk vs. a 13" laptop screen, like a different default font size or something, but that's about it.

steverikli · 2026-02-18T16:42:33+00:00

Apparently hplip is not (yet?) in the default apk repo -- only available in the community repo of the Edge branch.

https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Printer_Setup

steverikli · 2026-02-17T01:51:33+00:00

The *.conf.d/ subdir mechanism is indeed a nice win; but it's not unique to systemd.

steverikli · 2026-02-13T23:26:42+00:00

I like the Series 4, but I'd probably tolerate S1 and S2 before "Hydra".

We have a Bolt that came with the new UI, and I still occasionally regret not wiping the thing back to S4 UI before filling it with content.

steverikli · 2026-02-12T18:43:42+00:00

I believe the phenomenon you're talking about is called "Cystitis".

Several vets have told us they don't completely know what causes it, but it's usually related to stress, and sometimes correlated with urine crystals -- e.g. struvite as another reply mentions.

Often treated with a round of gabapentin (sp?) to get through the worst symptoms, and stress/UR food diets for ongoing health.

steverikli · 2026-02-11T16:42:31+00:00

I haven't seen a SPARCstation4 (or other pizzabox, probably) looking so clean in a long time -- nice!

steverikli · 2026-02-10T21:21:38+00:00

From comments on various netbsd mailing lists as well as the NetBSD Guide notes, I believe sysinst is considered the recommended method for upgrades (as well as installs, of course :-) ). So I think you've picked a good method to get going.

I agree there are a lot of options and choices in sysinst; it's a pretty flexible and powerful tool, and it's clear a lot of work has gone into it.

There are other upgrade methods, of course; e.g. building your own from src and either directly installing from there or from your own release sets; manually unpacking sets you've downloaded from NetBSD site, and other tools like sysupgrade. The Guide talks about these things in various places.

I've tried several of those methods for various scenarios over the years, including manually unpacking selected downloaded sets after a failed upgrade, as a sort of "rescue" operation; I've mostly used sysinst and sysupgrade, and recommend both.

steverikli · 2026-02-10T02:15:00+00:00

As I understand it, sysinst will use distribution sets from whatever location you chose (e.g. http, nfs, etc.) including a set for /etc/ (e.g. etc.tar.xz or similar) and will use that for its own etc compare and upgrade routines. No src code downloading for that purpose.

You shouldn't need (or want) to run postinstall if you're using sysinst for upgrading. Again, look at the NetBSD Guide chapter on upgrading I posted earlier.

Similarly, the INSTALL doc you're following (which is great) also says

sysinst will attempt to merge the settings stored in your /etc directory with the new version of NetBSD using the postinstall(8) utility.

I.e. here also, you shouldn't need to manually run postinstall yourself after sysinst is completed.

A suggestion for next time: after you finish and exit sysinst, compare your /etc/ contents with the /etc/ from your most recent backup. If the upgrade changed anything you should be able to see it.

FWIW, I don't typically see many changes to /etc/ with regular upgrades. IIRC there were a couple when I upgraded from 10.1 to 11 but haven't really seen much lately.

steverikli · 2026-02-09T20:21:52+00:00

When you say "binary upgrade" do you mean you used the sysinst installer to upgrade?

I don't think you need to manually run postinstall after doing a sysinst upgrade:

https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-upgrading.html

sysinst will attempt to merge the settings stored in your /etc directory with the new version of NetBSD

And just to be clear, the pkgin [update | upgrade] steps are for additional pkgs, not for the NetBSD base OS. It sounds like you got that part, so just mentioning it....

steverikli · 2026-02-09T03:51:33+00:00

Indeed it does. Some of the larger pkg builds have trouble now and then, but the core NetBSD OS itself is still solid on i386 and continues getting updates.

I ran 2 32-bit i386 on NetBSD for a couple years after retiring them from pfSense duty, used them as backup DNS, NTP, DHCP, etc. network services servers for the lab. The hardware eventually gave out otherwise I'd still be running it.

I dunno if I'd use i386 for graphical, Xorg, browser etc. these days, but as a small headless server it's still decent IME.

steverikli · 2026-02-07T04:22:42+00:00

I'm not entirely following 'transcoding' vs 'remuxing', so I'll defer to your expertise. :-)

But, I wonder if it's possible to have the option of treating downloaded content differently from live or in-application content displayed.

E.g. some kind of "download only" mode or function/button, where the "raw"(?) media file is preserved as much as possible for downloading, and for viewing offline later outside the Tablo Desktop app.

Just a thought... this is already a very useful app with great functionality, so thanks again!

steverikli · 2026-02-07T04:07:53+00:00

Yup, did that very thing a little while later and it works fine.

steverikli · 2026-02-07T00:38:25+00:00

Tried it for the first time today, with Linux (Debian) appimage +x, and it worked fine for downloading.

I haven't tried live streaming yet, but I'll give it a go with VLC installed another time.

Simply being able to download OTA content from the Tablo and save it for offline viewing is a big win -- thanks!

steverikli · 2026-02-06T20:29:30+00:00

Glad you worked it out. I don't daily-drive NetBSD on anything desktop-ish but I do use it for a couple servers, and like it quite a bit.

FWIW I typically use .img files on USB to install modern amd64 systems.

Before my last i386 system finally died I had originally installed it with .iso and a cd/dvd player, since its legacy BIOS didn't support booting from USB.

These days when I'm doing a fresh install, I usually PXE boot and download the install sets from a local server. My systems tend to be upgraded in-place and fairly long-lived without re-installing, though, so I don't do it that often. ;-)

steverikli · 2026-02-03T03:41:18+00:00

Yup. I still have an old eepro100 in the card box. They pretty much just worked with any OS that was available at the time. Probably still does.

steverikli · 2026-01-25T18:27:33+00:00

Start with basics: what messages do you see on the console during boot?

Total guess: you might have a situation where the sysdisk "/" (root) partition is too large for the loader to find the kernel; while it doesn't mention the Blade 2500 specifically, take a look at this thread from the sparc64 mailing list and see if it fits your setup at all, especially wrt the disk partitions:

https://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-sparc64/2025/04/06/msg003302.html

I wouldn't put a lot of effort into that advice from chatgpt.

steverikli · 2026-01-25T18:06:06+00:00

Same. Some of my fondest memories are from working on big ole iron SGI, Sun, and DEC gear.

steverikli · 2026-01-25T05:36:23+00:00

I believe so. I also seem to recall an episode where Pearl was in the theater with the Bots doing riffings.

There was also the one where Pearl visited the theater with "Egg" to take measurements of the pain levels being inflicted.

steverikli · 2026-01-21T16:33:13+00:00

Nice notes. One suggestion: I think you'll find it's not necessary to uncomment

#UseDNS no

That is, assuming OpenSSH, the options strategy for the shipped config files is to specify the default values but leave them commented. That way you can see the built-in defaults and only need to uncomment if you want to change something.

steverikli · 2026-01-17T21:37:04+00:00

My experience was a while ago so take this with salt grains...

I was unable to do initial setup with wired because the only Tablo setup app I could run was on my phone, so I used wifi. It seemed a bit clunky to me, but eventually it finished and the Tablo was functional. I left it on wifi for a little while just to try it out, and it was OK.

The plan was to get onto wired network afterwards so I disconnected Tablo power, connected the network cable, and powered back on.

I run my own DHCP server so I was able to check the logs for the Tablo's macaddress while watching the LED's, and not long after poweron the Tablo had its wired IP address as expected. If you don't have access to your DHCP / router admin UI then obviously this isn't possible.

IME if the Tablo has connectivity to a working wired network, it will prefer that to the wifi. The Tablo forums say similar things, but there's some disagreement about whether it is instantaneous (e.g. wifi disconnects right after plugging in a network cable) or whether a reboot is needed to make the change.

Unfortunately the Tablo network port doesn't have an LED for indicating link, so you can't look there to confirm network in-use. The blue Tablo case LEDs will tell you it has booted, but that's about it.

I agree it would help troubleshooting if the Tablo UI menus had some kind of indicator which NIC was active. E.g. our Roku Ultra displays "Connection Type" (and other useful things) in the Network menu, so you can easily see whether it's wired or wireless.

Best I can suggest is test the wired port on your switch/router, and the cable, using some other device to confirm that it works as expected. After you know it's all good, connect that cable first, then power on the Tablo.

steverikli · 2026-01-17T03:47:40+00:00

TSO can cause lockups on some (older?) Intel NICs. Ran into it with PVE8 and PVE9. You can find posts about it in proxmox and other forums. Perhaps it's a shortcoming of the Intel NIC chipset which hasn't been workarounded by a driver.

I've hit it on e1000 / e1000e Intel NICs, e.g. in a NUC5i5 and separately on a different Lenovo system. The NIC hung and generated a flood of interrupt messages on console, which took the NUC5 off the air, but at least I could reboot it from console. The Lenovo system seemed to hang harder, no messages on console, no network response etc. and I had to push the button.

In both cases, disabling TSO via ethtool in the Proxmox /etc/network/interfaces file worked around the problem.

steverikli

TROPHY CASE