Learning Administration Together

Personal Projects on Hold

Well, as the semester starts coming into full swing, I'm putting my personal projects on hold. While part of it is because I'm already studying a lot of tedious materials and learning even more will be hard, the biggest reason is my senior project. I also have a few monetary concerns, as I need to buy a decently-large SSD to run my VMs off of.

This doesn't mean the end of my posts for the rest of the semester. Instead, I will be documenting my senior project and my progress on it in addition to code updates on GitHub. My original project idea was to create an automation system for setting up a Raspberry Pi cluster, but the goal has now shifted. Instead, I will be attempting to adapt Rocks Cluster Distribution to ARM so that it works on Raspberry Pis. Currently the distribution only supports x86, x86_64, and IA-64, but Raspberry Pi clusters are a common enough beginner project that having it available will hopefully be well-received. My only real concern is that the most recent version is from December 2017, so it's been over a year since it last was updated. However, while re-packaging the distro I may end up helping update it so we will see if that makes a difference.

Right now it seems that the first step is to figure out what does and does not work on ARM. The CentOS base already runs on Raspberry Pi, but some of the required tools and libraries may need to be rewritten or re-packaged. The next step will be learning to cross-compile so that I can avoid compiling packages on a Raspberry Pi - I have a decent workstation so why not use it? Last, I will be learning to package a distro properly. There are a few recent Linux Journal articles that I can use for reference on this, and by this step I hope to be either done or close enough for it to make no difference.

These steps may change throughout the semester, I'll be meeting up with a faculty advisor for guidance. With such a well-defined project ahead of me, I hope to post weekly updates to document the process.

OS Refresh

As I mentioned in my previous post, I found out that my Windows installation was all sorts of screwed up. Even though I was using an SSD to house Windows, it somehow messed up its own installation and put its own bootloader on my Western Digital Green HDD. Given that …
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Void Linux - Take 2

Well, I finally did something worth making any kind of a post about. After some fussing, I installed Void Linux on my desktop - and the problem wasn't installing the system itself. As it turns out, my EFI bootloader is a mess and Void wasn't being provided an entry in the …
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Posting is hard
Sorry for the lack of updates, between several family events, adjusting to my current internship, and simply being bad at writing blog posts, this has simply fallen off the to-do list recently. However, here's an idea of what I'll be looking into and writing about:
- Installing Linux on my desktop …
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Void Linux - Intro

Last Sunday it came to my attention that my laptop was kind of messed up. Physically, it was fine (other than a minor scratch or ding here and there), but when it came to using it, this thing was a mess. It started out as a basic Xubuntu installation last …
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