Changelog 3

Addressbook visualization came to a halt

Previously I had tried to visualize my address book as a graph. I stopped when I noticed that the vcf export I had didn’t include the photos. This was a problem of the address book app I use on my phone, so I filed a bug report. This stopped my momentum to work on the project for the moment.

Now that the Simple Mobile Tools have been sold and are likely to go in a different direction I will probably have to replace most of my mobile apps anyway, though.

Work on video streaming solution

I installed Jellyfin (a video streaming) solution on my server. It was reasonably easy (thanks to NixOS), but I soon noticed that I don’t have enough storage space on my server to store all the movies and shows I want. I monitored the Netcup Adventskalender for cheap storage upgrades, but the right thing for me was not in there.

So I will have to buy for the regular price soon. It is not really expensive, so that is fine. After that I will be able to continue the work on Jellyfin.

Backup Sandra’s laptop

The one PC in our home that doesn’t run NixOS is Sandra’s laptop. On NixOS automatic backups are just a question of a few lines of config of course. But on Fedora I had to do everything by hand, including a systemd unit for triggering the backup. I used a guide of course.

The biggest problem I had after that was the initial backup, which took so long that it failed for some reason. The Laptop is a very weak one and I guess it was just too much for it.

So I started out with excluding the big directories (Music and Images) from the backup. Then, when the backup was successful I reincluded them gradually, so only a few GB of data had to be added to backups.

If this had been a work project I would have had to think of something better, but for a private project doing this by hand was fine.

And now we know to have working backups of all machines again, yea!

Monitoring

Wouldn’t it be nice if you got an email if there has not been a backup created for a few days? Now that the backups run I would like to monitor them. It is time to have monitoring.

But boy this stuff is complicated. Especially if you want to have it set up in a reproducible and documented way.

Zabbix didn’t work for me, so I looked into Graphana.

Graphana is cool in combination with Prometheus and Telegraf. At some point I also had Loki, Promtail and InfluxDB running. It is nice to see how well everything works together, but I found it very hard to understand what I need. Especially because I don’t even know what I want.

It would probably be easier if I had a working setup to learn from.

In the end I ended up with a selfmade dashboard that monitors my website (schauderbasis.de). That is fine for now, I will try to expand on this at some point.

IOPCC

I found out I had won the IOPCC. I was very proud and tried to explain the achievement to a few non-technical people. All of them were very supporting, but it was clear that I had not been able to get across the point of the contest.

So I wrote a blogpost about it.

Nixos channel update

I noticed that my Laptops Nixos is running on an old channel, so I updated it to the latest stable channel (from 22.11 to 23.11).

I used this guide to upgrade because I don’t do this very often. It went uneventful. Some config parameters had to be renamed and some software had to be replaced because it was not supported anymore (exa -> eza).

I took the opportunity to run nix-store --gc, for the first time in about a year. Many GB of storage were freed. But perhaps I shouldn’t have done it: When I recompiled my system it took nearly an hour (instead of less than a minute, like normally). I think a big chunk of that is building emacs from master.

Worth it, though.