Since last time I have been doing a lot of setup stuff with various computers.
Win10PC is gradually getting set up, the only stuff I really need it for is a handful of things like downloading gigabytes of maps or whatever, scanning, ripping DVDs and bulk Irfanview stuff so it isn’t moving along very fast but it is what will get used when I want to view charts with the keyboard as the screen is set up vertically for that, and having VNC running on it means I can do just about everything from over here at my desk without having to change seats. At the moment I still have to get the scanner and printer hooked up to it (well probably only the scanner because the printer can go onto mainpc). Unfortunately the storage spaces thingy doesn’t actually work the way the RAID mirroring used to work (it only works with full disks, not partitions) so RAID won’t be possible but I can move the home drive to the second disk and that is how I will set it up. There won’t actually be anything on it that matters anyhow because of the limited tasks it is used for.
serverpc is going very well after getting its disk capacity boosted last week as I had to restore the home volume after backing it up as that was the easiest way to restore it without having to leave one of the old disks inside it, putting the backup disk into the removable drive bay is easier. I took the opportunity to dump all the config files especially as some of them didn’t get backed up properly and wouldn’t restore, which hasn’t really been a big problem for restoring. The main task at the moment is to get all the backups of the other computers working again as with the reinstallations they all need stuff put back on them to make the backups over the network function correctly.
mediapc has also been reinstalled. I had put Xubuntu on it because it has better stuff for working with phones and things, but the biggest issue is with Cosmic, maybe because it is a beta or maybe not, that I just could not get it to hibernate. In the past it didn’t matter if it could hibernate or not, but with the different uses I am putting this computer to, I need to be able to save the session and come back to it. On Ubuntu hibernation is disabled by default and even when it was supposedly enabled and the hibernate button was present and did something when you clicked it, the computer was actually turning off instead of hibernating. So I decided the simple answer was to put Debian 9.5 on it, but I failed to notice that the second screen would turn itself off (just a little side effect of having a TV as a screen and it has a no signal turnoff timer that can’t be disabled) and then the logon greeter (the Linux name for the logon screen, which in MS parlance is called the Winlogon) tried to come up on the TV because it was still detectable (soft off and hard off are different because in soft off the display can still be detected). So after a lot of installation attempts that were seemly failing I just moved the mouse accidentally at the end of yet another attempt and the mouse comes back onto the active display and there is the greeter. So I was able to install 9.5 out of the box after all. I configured the spare SSD partitition as /tmp and lost some stuff I had downloaded onto it, but I will be able to download that stuff again.
bedroompc is working well with the network cable in place to be used for VNC and other non-internet networking (so grsync can run real fast) so that it can work well for internet connectivity via a tethered phone when the normal internet I have is off. I have used it quite a lot for this purpose, but still have a lot of data left at the the moment.
pc4 (for want of a better name) has Buster Alpha 3 running on it and I synced down the entire copy of my media library from bedroompc while I was reinstalling mediapc, this happened very fast over the cable. So I played media on it while I was working on mediapc with the various install issues that had that meant what should have been a simple install took about three days to complete.
And of course mainpc just toodled along like usual but I am still finishing off setup having reinstalled it not so long ago. I will set up the spare SSD partition as /tmp on both this computer and serverpc. So that’s coming to the end of the productive window of today, when I will soon break for tea and then move onto other things for the evening.