Came home and had a mad craving for Indian food.  The weather has finally cooled off and the winds were pretty high.  Still warm enough to dawn cycling shorts and do my 28 mile loop between Martinsville, Waunakee and home.  I have been reading the audio book The Big Short which covers how a few people saw the subprime mortgage crisis and it has been hard to set down.  Armed with good reading material, I set into the wind for a slow trek west.  After I reached Martinsville I started back east with a strong tail wind and must have traveled at an average speed of 20 MPH.  After the ride was over I really didn't feel all that fatigued, and my times and heart rates were pretty average.  Last year around this time my standard loop was my 12 miles airport-Ashton run.  I now do more than double that distance.
   A few days ago I shared the picture I didn't quite capture the way I wanted.  Today I got a better version but it still wasn't like what I saw originally.  It must have been the combination of what the clouds caused to be muted, and what the sunbeam illuminated.

The Sun Dragon completes its 200 GB micro SD card upgrade. I had put together a virtual machine to act as backup for DrQue.net and put it to work today. If all went well the change to the new micro SD card should only take a couple minutes. But if it didn’t, I would need time to troubleshoot the problem. But since I put together the backup server I switched to getting signed certificates, which I haven’t figured out how to move to a different location. The backup server knows how to synchronize itself with the Sun Dragon. By default the certificates don’t have read permissions to anyone but root. I needed to get things setup so the synchronization was able to make a copy. After that was done the backup server was pretty much ready to go. I switched the NAT on the router and the Sun Dragon was free for upgrades. And… nothing. The Sun Dragon wouldn’t boot. I had to break out an HDMI cable to see the boot messages.

As I suspected it was complaining about not being able to mount the micro SD card. What I didn’t like about this is that it paused for user input. The Sun Dragon has no keyboard or monitor. I found the mount option nobootwait and added that to the mount options. I wasn’t sure why it wasn’t mounting, but I couldn’t have it waiting. It didn’t work. The next boot it still halted and was waiting for user input. Herein lays the problem. I put the option on the wrong drive.

When I setup the new micro SD card, I knew enough to change the UUID to that of the old drive. This would allow fstab to mount the card without modification. But I had changed the UUID to the wrong drive in the list just like I had added the nobootwait to the same wrong drive. After changing the UUID of the micro SD card the system booted normally and was ready to go. A couple quick tests verified all services were ready and I switched the NAT from the backup server to the Sun Dragon.

The setup is nearly identical. The difference: rather than having around 1% free space on my website data drive I have 66%. That’s a lot better.

   World War II Days this afternoon in Rockford.  This year had more vehicles than any I had ever seen, and the field battle was impressive.  Steve and I spent over an hour learning about the Armenian partisans and their role in WWII.  It's always awesome to learn in detail something you knew very little about.

I picked up a 200 GB micro SD card from my buddy Pluvius. The Sun Dragon is quickly running out of space. It uses a 128 GB micro SD card. There are two larger options for micro SD right now: 200 GB and 256 GB. The 200 GB cards run around $75, and 256 GB around $200. However, Pluvius had one he was offloading for much cheaper. How he gets such good deals has always been a mystery, but I always take him up on deal for parts I need.

Now that I have the card it is time to start copying the website to it. That is around 113 GB of data. I used my laptop because it had an SD card reader. But I found that the drive would only mount read-only. I recall having this problem in the past. So rather than troubleshoot it I just used a USB-to-SD adapter. I put rsync to work and went to bed for the night. Moving 128 GB of data of a 100 Mbit connection wasn’t going to be quick, but I have plenty of time.

   Old electrical panel.

   Rainy today, but boy do those skies look cool.

   We have to replace the screen on our screened in porch on the second floor.  In the process, I figured I replace some of this rotten wood.

With the Let's Encrypt certificate working well it was time to setup auto renewal. The certificates expire every 90 days, but using a script they can be renewed automatically. I setup a cron job to do this and in theory come December when our current certificate expires the site should receive an updated certificate without any additional interaction.

Dawn over Lake Wingra on my ride into work.

It took a long time to get vacation pictures proofed, and even longer before I had all the posts about each day completed. But vacation posts are finally complete.

   I found this shot coming into Martinsville.  The sun was shinning brightly on the farm in the distant and made for a lovely picture.  But by the time I had my camera out the sun had been covered by clouds.  I hung out for several minutes waiting for the clouds to clear, but they never did give me the lighting over the farm I wanted.  I shall have to come back to improve this shot.