Meanwhile, aside from the significant relief of finally getting the first shot of a COVID-19 vaccine in my arm, I can also report the significant relief of getting my computer problems resolved.
When last we left our heroine, Time Machine had been having a lot of mysterious copy errors, and the only way I got it to work was to do a full backup in Safe Mode. Even that threw an error about problems setting ownership of files, and the copy errors returned as soon as I tried to do another backup in standard mode.
So while the whole meltdown of my primary computer is going on, the secondary one, Savah, has actually proven useful for reasons above and beyond “because Aroree is being stupid”.
I’ve been doing this ongoing massive re-org of my files, with an eye to creating a proper archive that Dara can burn to these fancy archival-quality discs we have. As part of this, I’ve been digging into my old web page files and thinking it’d be nice to restore working copies of earlier versions of my sites.
More technogeekery as well as screencaps of my work behind the cut!
A few days ago my belovedest Dara got us a shiny new NAS to use as a backup server. I was prepared to get excited about this, as up until now our Time Machine solution has been to use an older Macbook in the house (and by older, I mean, it’s still running Snow Leopard) as a Time Machine server. That box has three hard drives plugged into it, and Dara and I both have been using this for years mostly without problems.
However, as we’ve acquired more machines and that backup server gets older and older, it’s meant that our backups have been… shall we say… less reliable than we’d like.
This is a post about that, in in-depth detail, so I can point at this when I put out calls to ask for help. Technogeekery behind the cut!
Short form summary: my current work machine is a 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro. And it has been driving me fucking spare because it keeps kernel panicking. If there are any MacBook maintenance gurus out there who could help me out with this, I’d appreciate it.
So way back when, when Google killed off Google Reader, I wound up flipping about a lot in search of an RSS reader solution that’d let me get the links I wanted to follow in all the places I wanted to follow them.
I finally settled on a solution that didn’t exactly satisfy me: using a Feedly account, plus two different RSS clients. I needed one RSS client to pull stuff down from Feedly, and it’s an RSS client I do like–but unfortunately it doesn’t support authenticated feeds. So I also had to install a second client to get at the feeds I wanted to read from Dreamwidth (and at least until everybody seriously bailed on LJ, LJ as well).
But I had to also keep the first client, because the second one didn’t talk to Feedly.
In other words: stupidly complicated.
(And this is also stupidly long for a post, so here’s a More/cut tag for y’all.)
The last few days have been pretty big for solving computer issues at the Murkworks. So here’s a writeup about what I solved!
First and foremost, I got crossposting to Dreamwidth working again. Turns out the root cause of the problem was Dreamwidth changing security settings under the hood, as per this post. The instructions they gave for generating an API key for the client Semagic also worked for the JournalPress plugin I use to crosspost off my WordPress blog. So whew, finally, that’s sorted.
Second tech issue solved: my secondary laptop Savah (the one with the dual partitions of Windows 10 and Linux) had to have its backup settings in both OSers rejiggered, since they stopped talking to the laptop we use as our Time Machine/general backup server. We’ve got this ancient Mac that our newer Macs keep talking happily to, and it’s got three, count ’em, three different hard drives plugged into it serving as backups.
But Win10 stopped talking to it and I don’t really know why. So Dara came up with the useful alternate plan of setting up Samba on one of our Linux servers, making a share on that, and letting Windows 10 do its backup to that share. This also necessitates excluding the directory that share’s in from the main server backups. But so far this seems to be working.
Third solved tech issue is bigger, and I’ll spend another post on that, because that’s all about finally finding a solution to my RSS reader needs!
I’d posted last month on my angelahighland.info site about how our webserver, the very server where annathepiper.org is hosted, kept crashing.
Good news! I’m pleased to report that for the time being, anyway, we’ve found a solution. I also put that post on angelahighland.info instead of here, just because that’s where the first post was. But if you’re interested, you can find the details right over here.
