Series 7 Episode 11 – In this episode Mark has been installing the new version of Pi-Hole, he has also been looking at installing OpenSuse as a file server, Wayne speaks about FreeNAS and ZFS, introductory and advanced guides for rsync, a Rainbow Sense HAT for the Raspberry Pi, more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.
00:27 After a few technical glitches, Wayne finally welcomes us to yet another episode of the Binary Times, this particular episode being the 11th of Season 7. The weather outside isn’t great, windy, sunny, rainy, cloudy, all rolled into one. Mark questions whether wittr.in is really reflective of the weather.
02:40 Mark tells us he’s spun up a Pi-Hole Version 5 on a Raspberry Pi 2. He also tells us about Alan Pope’s Raspberry Pi Imager application, which makes spinning up a Raspberry Pi OS even easier. Wayne tells us about how cool LibreElec and Kodi are. Mark agrees and goes on to tell us about his server misadventures. The takeaway is be careful the keystrokes you choose when waking a monitor from sleep! Mark then talks about installing Windows 10 to do a course and says the experience is much better than he remembers it (well done Microsoft), before telling us that he reckons he’s going to install OpenSuse Leap with btrfs on his server. The guys discuss FreeNAS as an alternative and Lawrence Systems youtube videos for FreeNAS advice.
Mark goes on to question the value of certification, which kicks off a bit of a conversation around certification, training, education and life in general.
27:21 In the spirit of collaboration, Wayne thanks Robert for his recent help and tells us his own server tale.
28:55 Wayne brings up a recent conversation the guys had with Glady, a long term supporter of the show. She was looking for backup alternatives and Wayne recommended rsync as a good choice, also recommending the documents “How to Use rsync Command to Copy Files on Ubuntu”, “How to Use rsync with Examples” and the “Non-Beginner’s Guide to Syncing Data with Rsync”, as well as the man pages of course. Mark also recommends explainshell.com.
31:41 Wayne discusses an email we received from Willi in Germany and his fork of a little bit of software for timeshift that takes a snapshot every time you run any APT operation on debian systems, as well as a very detailed guide with videos about how to install luks encrypted btrfs on Ubuntu, PopOS and Manjaro. The chat moves onto file systems and backups and Wayne mention a particular video on FreeNAS from Lawrence Systems as useful.
38:34 Wayne brings the conversation around to running an IT business during COVID and the guys discuss how to do it.
43:14 Wayne talks about Nextcloud Talk and specifically the benefits of Talk 9.
46:06 Mark thanks Paul Clyne for his generosity in providing another laptop
47:22 Under the Hood – Wayne kicks this one off with a mention of the Learn you some Python Humble Bundle from No Starch Press. Wayne goes on to tell us about an article on the Magpi Magazine which shows how to make a Sense HAT rainbow window display. Wayne’s major under is hold down the CTRL and F5 keys together in Firefox to refresh the page and clear the cache. The guys mention Glady’s tip of the OneTab extension, an extension that converts tabs to a list to reduce memory use.
Mark’s Under the Hood is this: in nautilus, click on other locations, then in the connect to server field, type “admin:///” and voila! after you’ve put in your password, you’re in superuser mode! In caja, just right click and open as administrator. In dolphin, just right click, open with, and file manager as super user.
55:41 Irish Saying of the show is “An labhraíonn tú Gaeilge.?” or do you speak Irish.
We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did making it!
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