Personal Stuff

We had a big wind storm here on monday. Knocked out power for about 5 hours (which wasn't so bad, since we have a generator, but was anoying). One of our large (150' douglas fir) trees got knocked down by the wind. Luckily it fell away from the house and a fence, and managed to hit a thicket of blackberries I was in the process of trying to remove. Still will need to take care of it, as it's in the way of our path. Also, our dishwasher died (gonna be a few weeks before someone can look at it). It's sad that repairing something takes a few weeks, but I bet I could buy a new one in a few days.

Day of learning on friday

Red Hat does these quarterly "day of learning" days, where everyone is encouraged to go learn something. Work related, not work related, interesting, useful or not. It's really a great thing. This time I decided to play around with Home Assistant some more and figure out how it does things. Adam Williamson mentioned it in a matrix discussion, and I had been meaning to look into it too, so seemed like a great time. I picked up a Home Assistant green (which is basically a small arm box that has home assistant (HA) all installed on it and ready to go. Initial setup was easy, no issues.

Several of my devices are using bluetooth, so I also picked up some little esp32 boards to use as a bluetooth proxy. It's pretty amazing how small these little guys are. I did make one mistake ordering though: I got some with microusb. Had to dig up some old cables. I think I am going to replace them with ones that have usbc. So, I flashed the bluetooth proxy on one, it joined my wifi and... then it didn't work. Took me a while to find out that since my wireless and wired networks are completely seperate, I needed to run a mdns-repeater on my gateway/firewall box to repeat the mdns advertisements. After doing that it saw that just fine, along with a printer that was on wifi.

I connected up my ups server (nut) with no problems, so now I have nice charts and graphs of power usage, battery state, etc.

I have some 'smart' light switches from Deako here too. They connect and work with an adroid app via bluetooth, so I thought they were using bluetooth for HA integration too, but it turns out it requires wifi to connect to them. I do have a old dongle to connect them to wifi, and I tried to set that up, but it seems to just hang at the end when it says it's preparing it. They no longer make that Deako Connect dongle, so I mailed them about it. Perhaps the provisioning for it is even no longer there.

Managed to add my car in with not much trouble. Kinda cool to have all its sensors available easily on the dashboard.

This stuff is a giant rabbit hole. Some things I want to do when time/energy permits:

• There's a way to connect a esp32 device to the serial port on the hot water heater and get all kinds of info from it.

• There's a way supposedly to connect to a internal connector on the heat pumps I have and get a ton of info/control them.

• I'd like to figure a way to monitor my water holding tank. That one is going to be tricky, as the pumphouse is down a hill and not in line of sight of the house. Seems like people do this one of two ways: a pressure sensor dropped in the bottom of the tank, or a distance sensor at the top showing where the water line is.

• After looking I think bluetooth is too much of a mess for things usually, so I order a Zigbee thing for the HA server and some zigbee based power outlets and some temp sensors to try that out.

Lots of fun.

caching issues

So, starting on tuesday there were some issues with out caching setup. First it was s390x builds. They would request some package/repodata from their local cache, it would in turn request it from the main ones and sometimes it would just get a partial read or a incorrect size. I couldn't find anything that seemed wrong. We are in Freeze for beta, so no real changes have been made to infrastructure. So, I was left with trying various things. I updated and rebooted the s390x cache machine. I blocked a bunch of ip's that were hitting the main cache too much. I updated and rebooted the main cache machines. Including a sidetrack where I noticed they were running an old kernel. Turns out 'sdubby' got installed there somehow and it was installing new kernels as efi. The vm wasn't booting efi, so it just kept booting on it's old kernel. After all that it seemed like the issue was gone, or perhaps happening much less often?

After that however, some folks are seeing problems with ostree downloads. All of them I see also don't exist on the cache hosts either, so I am not sure whats happening. I'm very sorry for the issue, as I know it's affecting a number of people. Will keep trying to track it down.

riscv secondary

Managed to mostly sort out builder authentication I think. There's eome limitataions for external builders, but I think we can live with that. Hopefully next week we will start onboarding builders, then will need to import builds, then it will be time to start building!

comments? additions? reactions?

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