I do a lot in free software for ham radio, and Steve at Zero Retries encouraged me to take this email I sent him and translate it into something here. UK Packet Radio Network UKPRN is going nicely, with the Nottingham and South segment really quite impressively interconnected over RF - https://nodes.ukpacketradio.network/packet-network-map.html?rfonly=1 I’m excited to see the growth down there! We’re sorting out forwarding and routes in Aberdeen too, and working to grow the RF path to Inverness. …

As mentioned before, I use sbuild and gbp to build packages for debian. Since I first started out, this has developed some and now runs on a different machine and uses zfs! I’ve been building a private repo for our packet radio project to ensure that users on Raspberry Pi and other platforms have the most recent code backported. It’s very frustrating as a user (and as one of the more experienced heads in the community) for people to be approaching a task with software that’s 3+ years out of date at this time. I believe Raspi Foundation are, at the time of writing, about to release a new revision of their OS. This’ll be great for users but it makes things a moving target for me! …

I use git buildpackage to wrangle and build all my debian packages. It’s nice and nippy when it works, especially when combined with my sbuild setup. I’ve never dug too deep into functionaliy, but I’m reading the manual a lot at the moment. An annoying quirk, I have found, is Debian’s unwavering dependence on tarballs for every build activity. I found myself following the wiki, specifically ‘using the upstream repo’ and becoming very frustrated that gbp buildpackage shouts about needing a tarball. …

I use sbuild and btrfs for my debian packaging, it’s quick, solid and was a big improvement on my git-pbuilder setup. I think that’s due to the snapshotting and disposable nature of live chroots. This has been my bible for this, and is a regular reference for me when things break. At the moment, I’m working on a project which will require a repository covering multiple architectures, distribuitions and targets. I’m looking at ubuntu i386, x84_64, maybe armhf/aarch64, raspberry pi armhf & aarch64 and some debian targets too eventually. …

I finally fell into the dd trap. I dd’d a FreeBSD Beaglebone black image to /dev/sdb, where my home directory lives. It should have been /dev/mmcblk0, but I trusted tab completion and didn’t check dmesg. After a quick check of gparted, it was obvious what had happened. I’ve nuked the partition table on the drive. Well done. The data in /home/hibby was intact, however. My home directory was still responding, I could load new files ith no corruption. A quick check of mtab tells me ~ lived at /dev/sdb6. It turns out the first ~200GB of data on the drive were taken up by an old windows install or something. So, I had to work out how best to recover that partition and that one alone. I didn’t care about the rest. Step 1: Do not turn the computer off, as it still works. …