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Planet FSFE

OpenBSD Worrying RAID

I wanted to move a couple of USB hard drives from one OpenBSD machine to another. They are configured with softraid(4) as RAID 1 (mirrored). When I plugged the drives into the new machine though, nothing happened with softraid. This was pretty worrying.

Both the drives showed in dmesg output so the issue was specifically to do with softraid. The man page for bioctl(8) talks about -c creating a “new” RAID device which sounded a little too destructive. I asked for help in #openbsd and apparently the language in the man page is misleading. The -d flag has recently been updated to say “detach” rather than “delete” to try to address this.

Multicast IPTV

For almost a decade, I’ve been very slowly making progress on a multicast IPTV system. Recently I’ve made a significant leap forward in this project, and I wanted to write a little on the topic so I’ll have something to look at when I pick this up next. I was aspiring to have a useable system by the end of today, but for a couple of reasons, it wasn’t possible.

Light OpenStreetMapping with GPS

Now that lockdown is lifting a bit in Scotland, I’ve been going a bit further for exercise. One location I’ve been to a few times is Tyrebagger Woods. In theory, I can walk here from my house via Brimmond Hill although I’m not yet fit enough to do that in one go.

Instead of following the main path, I took a detour along some route that looked like it wanted to be a path but it hadn’t been maintained for a while. When I decided I’d had enough of this, I looked for a way back to the main path but OpenStreetMap didn’t seem to have the footpaths mapped out here yet.

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