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Pi

2023-07-02

So, it's kind of fitting. I was watching a Person of Interest episode yesterday. It was the episode where Reese is apprehended and in jail (which made for AWESOME screentime for Finch, Fusco and Carter. love that). And Finch explains that Pi contains the entirety of the universe in its digits. Your social security number, your phone number, your birth date, etc. It just continues to go on, and your information will be in there, in a single value.

The reason why I'm mentioning Pi is because I'm wrangling with a Raspberry Pi devide -- rather, a Libre Computer device that I bought in lieu of the Pi. I had previously set up Pi-Hole to rid my home network of ads and spying connections, and it was working great. And then I had the greatest idea of turning that device into a Network Attached Storage (NAS), so that I can host all of my movies and tv shows and music files there for easy consumption. After all, if something is out of sight (i.e. not on my desktop), I keep on forgetting to watch it. So. That was my grand plan.

First, I panicked because I accidentally knocked out the SD card from the board. I tried plugging it back in, but it wasn't working, saying that it's scanning for the usb ports. Uh oh, that's not good. I was panicking for a bit, until I realized that the USB Keyboard attached to it... is causing the device to not boot. What in the world. So, I booted it up after getting another keyboard, and tried to install OpenMediaVault. Turns out I can't install it with the desktop version of Raspbian running. Okay. Got it.

So I flash the SD card again, running it headless. But it won't let me SSH. And it's fucked! because without SSH, I can't even interact with the machine in any meaningful way. I look up, and turns out I have to create a file in the SD card called 'ssh' for it to let me ssh upon bootup. I thought the whole point of using the Pi Imager was to avoid doing that! So I create the file, try to boot it up again. It still doesn't let me ssh. I look up again, and turns out I have to create a user profile file in the SD card too. What the fuck, I thought the Pi Imager did that for me. Whatever. So I do it again. Create the stupid file, and plug it in. And now I'm able to ssh into the machine.

I'm typing out this blog post as the upgrades are going through. I think it's going to work this time! I'm installing pi-hole again, and hope that it will go through without a hiccup. I even have the backup file from the previous instance of pi-hole. It worked! I can access the admin console from my laptop. I'm uploading the backup file again, and hope that it works out.

It's working! So I just need to install OMV. I try to install it and it still says I'm running a desktop environment. I'm. Fuck. Jesus christ.

I end up with a simple Samba setup and an Emby server. The transfer speeds are kind of horrendous. oops.