Lab Reports

Fixing a Synology DS1618+ — December 8. 2025
Alexandria, a Synology DS1618+, had been inoperable for several months. The troubleshooting and repair process was frustrating, involving false, misleading, and vague error messages, incomplete instructions, an AI agent that provided incomplete and misleading information, and bad interactions between their web UI and a password manager. Nevertheless, the system is now functioning normally again. This report describes how the repair was accomplished.
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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.
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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/.
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Sunrise — December 11, 2024
DRAFT Our lab includes a variety of older Sun hardware. This describes how we boot some of it.
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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.
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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)