After my last post about the Lightning Node using a MOD-1016 (Embedded Adventures), some tests and time has passed by. Especially I noticed, the disturber and noise rate is high. High as in, it disturbs the normal workflow. I was occasionally able to measure some lightnings, but with far than expected and anticipated precision and number. So back to the design, and start to think about pitfalls and design flaws.
My working hypothesis is, that because the small little antenna of the MOD-1016 is heading towards the Arduino Nano, it gets much noise from the microcontroller itself. So I decided to de-solder the current header and resolder it on the other side, so the antenna points to the outside. This is how the final product looks like
Arduino Nano with BME280 and MOD-1016 as Lightning station
Preliminary tests look pretty good, as I do not detect any noise and distrubers anymore, while still being able to communicate with the MOD-1016.
Now, back into the field with the box. Let's hope for some nice thunderstorms this week 🙂
There are two kinds of users: The ones, who encrypt their stuff and the ones, who never had lost something or never got something stolen. Imagine your Laptop being stolen on the train. Not only, you probably lost all of your data (Backups!), but also there is now a stranger that has access to potentially very private data - Pictures of your last birthday, company records you need to keep secret or the new piece of code that is awesome and the capital of your startup you just wanted to create. Plenty of reasons for investing a little bit of time in your digital self-defence, and a sane full-disk encryption is a major part of it.
I personally have two different approaches: VeraCrypt (successor of TrueCrypt after they surprisingly closed, leaving lots of speculations about their non-commitment to build in a secret backdoor for a large state agency, but that is based on pure speculation and is on the list of conspiracy theorems that probably turn out to be at least somehow concise enough to be taken seriously.) seems to be sane enough to be used or LUKS. In this article I'm gonna cover LUKS, as I consider this the canonical way for every mature Linux environment.
Recipe
Assuming the HDD is /dev/sdb and you want to call it Cryptodisk
Reformat the external HDD. Create a single partition with any filesystem (we will overwrite this in the next step)
Make sure all filesystems for that disk are unmounted.
cryptsetup -y -v luksFormat /dev/sdb1
Enter passphrase.
Write the passphrase on a sheet of paper and store it on a safe place.
REALLY do it. You probably will forget the passphrase and then you can cry your data goodbye
Open the crypdevice: cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 Cryptodisk
mkfs.xfs /dev/sdb1
cryptsetup luksClose Cryptodisk
Plug the disk out and re-plug it in. In caja/nemo it should appear as encrypted device. If you click on it, it asks for the passphrase and it will be mounted. Alternatively, user cryptsetup cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 Cryptodisk mount /dev/mapper/Cryptodisk /mnt/Cryptodisk
Note: It's possible to compartmentalize multiple partitions by putting a LVM volume atop cryptsetup. This is more advanced but pretty much straightforward.
Step by Step guide
I plug in my HDD and assume it's gonna be recognised as /dev/sdb.
First, We need to make sure that it's unmounted
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$sudo umount/dev/sdb?
Next, format the HDD. I normally use parted, but gparted seems to be the nicer way, as it's graphical and pretty easy. So, start gparted on the disk
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$sudo gparted/dev/sdb
# In Wayland this might cause trouble, as sudo and Wayland are not super nice to each other ... That's beyond the scope of what I write down here, sorry :-)
MAKE SURE IT's THE RIGHT DISK. Do the partitions look like the ones expected? Is there anything fishy? Once you clear your partition table or (even worse) wrote a new filesystem, it's unlikely you can fetch your data without any losses. Take a breath and double-check before doing anything.
OK, Then create the partition you want to encrypt. Select a random filesystem, as we are anyways going to delete the filesystem. It's only important to create the layout correctly. In my case it looks like the following: one partition that takes the full space (Little bit of empty space at the end is needed by GPT for the Backup table)
gparted with the newly created layout
Close gparted and encrypt the partition using cryptsetup
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$sudo cryptsetup-y-vluksFormat/dev/sdb1
WARNING!
========
Thiswill overwrite data on/dev/sdb1 irrevocably.
Are you sure?(Type uppercase yes):YES
Enter LUKS passphrase:
Verify passphrase:
Command successful.
Congratulations, you created your first encrypted parition! Now we are gonna put a filesystem on that one, so you can actually use it 🙂
So, we are gonna "open" the cryptdevice. This means, we are putting an encryption/decryption layer, atop which we can run our filesystem
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# Assuming you want to name it Cryptodisk. The name doesn't matter, it's just for the system to find the device
$sudo cryptsetup luksOpen/dev/sdb1 Cryptodisk
Cryptsetup asks for the Passphrase. After successfully opening the device, it will be listed as /dev/mapper/Cryptodisk
Now we create a filesystem. I chose xfs because it's a nice working horse, that runs everywhere, but you can choose whatever you want.
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$sudo mkfs.xfs/dev/mapper/Cryptodisk
Great, now you've created the filesystem. Close the disk with cryptsetup
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$sudo cryptsetup luksClose Cryptodisk
$sync
Wait until everything on the disk has been written (it stops flashing, depending on your disk) and unplug the disk.
The next time you plug your disk in, it will be recognised by caja/nemo as Encrypted Device, you type in your Passphrase and it will be automatically mounted (or with cryptstetup luksOpen and mount but the purpose was to create a convenient way to work with your external disks).
The encrypted disk appears conveniently and can be mounted with a single click
Congratulations, you just created your first fully encrypted external HDD!
The headline picture was created btw. by using the amazing dekryptize tool - a really cool ncurses animation to show how decrypting is definitely NOT working 😉
I've just got a brand new Raspberry Pi 4. For now I'm just playing around a bit with it. Until openSuSE Leap will be available, I'm using Raspbian Buster which comes by default with ext4. Since I want to have snapshots, the first thing I want to do is to convert the existing root partition into btrfs. So let's do this.
0. Get Raspbian
First, flash Raspbian to a SD card and boot it. I also recommend to run a system update after booting into Raspbian. There are plenty of tutorials on the internet, that are probably far better than what I can write.
1. Prepare initramfs
In Raspbian btrfs is included as module. In order to make the kernel mount a btrfs root filesystem, we need to build the corresponding initramfs. First install the necessary tools
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sudo apt install initramfs-tools btrfs-tools
Now we add the btrfs module to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
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$vi/etc/initramfs-tools/modules
btrfs
xor
zlib_deflate
raid6_pq
Next is to build the initramfs
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mkinitramfs-o/boot/initramfs-btrfs.gz
And tell the bootloader to load the initramfs, by editing /boot/config.txt
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$vi/boot/config.txt
# For more options and informations see
# http://rpf.io/configtxt
# Some settings may impact device functionality. See link above for details
initramfs initramfs-btrfs.gz
[...]
And then reboot the device, to check if everything is set up properly. If the boot succeeds, shutdown the Raspberry and take the SD-Card to another computer. If you run at this stage into trouble, probably a filename is wrong and you should be still able to recover. Otherwise: Just start from scratch - at this point really nothing is lost.
2. Convert ext4 rootfs to btrfs
In my case I insert the SD card into my laptop. The SD card gets recognised as /dev/mmcblk0 and contains the following partitions:
To convert the filesystem to btrfs, we are now doing the following steps:
Optional: Make sure, the rootfs is clean (run fstck)
Convert ext4 to btrfs using btrfs-convert
Mount new btrfs root
Edit /etc/fstab
Edit /boot/cmdline.txt
On my system, I have to do the following steps
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$fsck.ext4/dev/mmcblk0p2# This is optional but I recommend it
$btrfs-convert/dev/mmcblk0p2# Convert ext4 root to btrfs
$mkdir/mnt/sdcard# Here we will mount the rootfs
$mount-tbtrfs/dev/mmcblk0p2/mnt/sdcard# Mount newly created rootfs
Now we edit /etc/fstab and change ext4 to btrfs. We also need to disable the filesystem-check by setting the last two digits in the btrfs line to 0
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$vi/mnt/sdcard/etc/fstab# Edit /etc/fstab
proc/proc proc defaults00
PARTUUID=4301c17b-01/boot vfat defaults02
PARTUUID=4301c17b-02/btrfs defaults,noatime00
IMPORTANT: Set the last two settings in /etc/fstab to 0 and 0. The last 0 is especially important for btrfs root, since fsck and btrfs do not go so well together.
Lastly we edit /boot/cmdline.txt. We neet to replace rootfstype=ext4 to rootfstype=btrfs and set fsck.repair=no
IMPORTANT: It is crucial to set fsck.repair=no. I was stuck at some weird "mounting failed: Invalid argument" errors, because the system wanted to perform a fsck and failed.
3. Now the fun starts
This is only the kickoff. Now the funny things, like subvolumes, snapshots ecc. start
Have a lot of fun! 🙂
Caveats
After a kernel update, you will need to run mkinitramfs again. Probably it's the best to only do manual kernel updates (even security updates) as otherwise your Raspi might not be able to boot again.
Additional notes
Check those notes, in case something went wrong. Those emphasis the steps I had to to to make this work
Fsck had cause me a lot of trouble. In case you run into mount invalid errors, check if you have disable fsck in /etc/fstab (the last zero) and in /boot/cmdline.txt
Apperently btrfs-convert doesn't change the UUID. If you find yourself with "device not found" or similar errors, this might has changed and you will need to change the UUIDs
After a Kernel update you will need to run mkinitramfs again. Keep that in mind (and maybe disable auto-updates)
Common pitfalls
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mounting/dev/mmcblk0p2 failed:Invalid argument
Crappy image of the console output with the "mounting ... failed: invalid argument" error
I got this error message when I forgot to edit cmdline.txt. Make sure, you have configured /boot/cmdline.txt correctly (especially the rootfstype=btrfs and fsck.repair=no)
I just wrote a small Bash script for creating offline-backups of a bunch of virtual machines on a server using btrfs snapshots.
The script shutsdown all running KVM machines, waits until they are down, creates a (readonly) btrfs snapshot and spins the machines back up. All together takes less than a minute. After the process I have an image of all KVM machines in the state, when the machines are shut down. This is then suitable for storing the machine image files on a different machine to have a complete working state of the machines. This is part of my backup (more hardware failure) strategy for one of our general purpose servers at work.
The KVM instances need to be in a btrfs subvolume, otherwise it doesn't work
See the script as gist on GitHub. You will need to do some adjustments and probably test it a couple of times, until it will work nicely.
When I first arrived here, I got the impression of a good old, yet modernized highly industrialized place. Maybe it was because we have been travelling from Heathrow to the inner city via the Tube, and there is something industrial about the old train tracks. Also, you get an immediate insight in how the city's infrastructure is organised and is maintained - alongside the tracks you constantly see different kind of cables, that sometimes are going a bit chaotic on the walls next to the train rails. Clearly the city grow went a bit out of hands already long time ago ... This impression holds throughout my whole experience in this amazing historical city where all kinds of people come together and live together.
I'm not gonna cover the default London things like Big Ben, Tower Bridge, ecc. Those have been exhaustively covered, I'm not gonna compete with much more talented people, who can do those things just much better than me. I'm gonna write through the humble eyes of a somewhat confused traveller discovering a huge city.
The tube (London Underground)
London's tube is old. I mean it was the world's first underground passenger railway, starting in 1863. In contrast to other subways I cannot shake the feeling of, that it would need some kind of modernization: You struggle more than once, if you try to get your 20+kg suitcase up a stupid staircase ... Even more when you are used to have escalators everywhere, like it is pretty much the default in plenty of other places ... At least my fitness-tracker is super happy about the number of floors you do throughout a day. I guess it's because the tube has already been there for quiet some time and it's very difficult to change or modernize the fundamental structure, as it would be required to put escalators everywhere. Apart from that, it's also sometimes pretty much slippery, when it's raining. And, because it's England, that occurs not just occasionally.
Well, at least, they take everything with the right amount of British Charme 🙂
What I'm a bit missing in the tube, are the always present food and coffee stands. I guess for some reason they have banned them, and it's something that I really miss. There was always something nice about the bakeries and the coffee-to-go stands in underground/subway/metro stations, because it was a pretty reliable supply of breakfast and coffee for the tired traveller. I really miss them already, and it was day one, when I wrote this down!
All in all, the tube provides very good transportation, and the Oyster-Card is a super convenient method of having an anonymous pre-paid card for your inner-city travels.
Something old, something new, something red
Wherever you are, you will always find something old, like a industrial brick-stone building, a old sign or a old-looking bridge or passage and something new and modern, like a skyscraper a very modern bridge (Millennium bridge) or a new startup forming somewhere. And this throughout whole London.
It's apparently a very busy and fast moving city, where lots of new start-ups are founded that try to somehow merge into a historic place, that was the foundation place of the industrial revolution.
And then, of course, you will always find the typical red telephone boots and the very typical red double-decker busses. They are just everywhere.
That's for now, I hope to have the time to write some follow-up posts. For now, I'm in the Peaks and don't want to waste the whole day messing around with the bazillions of pictures I made during the last days
I just recently got a new Laptop (a T440p) to test it, if it suits my needs. The old x220 is still a nice companion, but I kind of need a bit more horsepower on my daily companion.
Let me tell you something about the magic of Linux - I just removed the old SSD from my x220 and put it into the T440p. It booted out of the box, with all my configurations and everything in place. No need to reconfigure or even reinstall anything. I could be productive in a couple of minutes. Also transferring the SSD was a matter of some screws, so no problem at all. That's how it should be. That's one of the reasons, why soldered-in SSD suck so badly.
So, everything was working nicely, except for some reason NetworkManager seemed to have forgotten all the Wifi connections. Except, they were still there and configured, just for the Wifi interface of the other laptop. And reconfiguring all of them is kind of boring. There has to be a better way
NetworkManager & System connection
NetworkManager stores all the connections in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections. They are there as plaintext files (restricted to root through)
Turns out, the line we need to change in every file is the following
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[wifi]
mac-address=XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
This is the mac-address of my old laptop, and I just need to replace it with the MAC of my new laptop. Easy as goo pie. The following one-liner does the job. Remember to replace YY:YY:YY:YY:YY:YY with the MAC address of your laptop
Two years ago I wrote a simple python script in order to extract the locations of CampingCard.is and create a handy GPX file for my navi and mobile phone. I'm kind of surprised, that the same script still runs.
Here are the locations for this year. Enjoy! 🙂
Just for completeness, here are also the links to the files of the previous years
My Pull-Request for including the CCfits package in Spack has just been merged into the development version. Very nice!
I use spack extensively on our scientific clusters in order to provide environment modules with various software packages (and versions) to our users. And because we need the CCfits package, I've created this package for spack. Now it's upstream and I hope that it makes the work of many other system administrators easier.
Today I was gonna try to make a full-rye bread. I used my own sourdough starter, and let the dough ripe overnight. Stirring and firmly mixing the dough of a pure rye dough turns out to be fairly exhausting. The consistency is super gluey and it's more like fresh concrete or grout.
Anyways, after mixing I gave it a third rise by using some fresh yeast (10g yeast per kg dough) and let it rise for another hour before baking. So in total, there were 3 rises (sourdough, mixed ingredients, and with yeast), the first one being overnight, the other once roughly an hour.
Ingredients for this bread are: rye flour, water, salt, sourdough starter (from my own culture) and a little bit of fresh yeast.
Fine result for the first try
Cut in half
With a little bit of butter
Final result
The taste is very good: It has it's own aroma, coming from the sourdough and the rye and does not necessary need additional spices. It tasted very nice on it's own and with butter and does not become boring like this. I can see this bread to be very nice together with some blue-cheese and honey.
Summary: I'm satisfied with the result for a new recipe and the first try of it. Looking forward to tomorrow's breakfast!
