Lab Reports

Venti Backups for Unix Hosts — December 13, 2024
Strand 1 offers backup services for clients', and our own, Unix hosts. This report describes how that is provided and used, using Plan 9 from User Space on the Unix hosts talking to a Plan 9 system elsewhere in the network.
(html | ps | pdf)

Daily Plan — March 4, 2024
This report describes the current set of plain text files and short scripts I use to track my day's work items and produce a log of past work. The system produces a historical set of daily files, pushes to both finger and (indirectly) the web, includes optional carry-forward of unfinished tasks, and uses mostly unstructured text for high flexibility. The system described can be found at http://txtpunk.com/daily/.
(html | ps | pdf)

Sunrise — December 11, 2024
DRAFT Our lab includes a variety of older Sun hardware. This describes how we boot some of it.
(html | ps | pdf)

Testing a usb3sun on local Sun hardware — November 1, 2023
We test a new revision A3 https://funny.computer.daz.cat/usb3sun/ usb3sun running firmware 1.5 with a variety of keyboards against the lab's compatible Sun equipment. All host systems work as expected. Most keyboards work as expected; two do not. No variation is observed with keyboard-host combinations.
(html | ps | pdf)

Setting up RS-232 on a Raspberry Pi — September 29, 2023
The Raspberry Pi can be configured to treat two of its GPIO pins as a uart. This provides a ttl uart, which is much less common than RS-232 on peripheral devices or for talking between systems. An inexpensive converter can give a Raspberry Pi a RS-232 serial port.
(html | ps | pdf)