gene1934

This is NOT a support request, more of a brag. Needing a backup system, I was enamored of the low power requirements to run the bpi-m5. But they have no sata ports to drive bigger SSD's. But I bought a 5 stack of 4Tb TMSC built SSD drives at $200/copy, figuring on using a USB3.2 hub and startech's usb3.2 to sata adaptors, a big drive cage and a 50 watt 5 volt psu. More than 3 drives plugged in was too much current for the hub, itgot hot & shut down, so I bought another hub & glued it to the otherside of the drive cage. Problem solved. Printed the shelves to hold the drives and a BPI-m5. I configured the 5 SSD's into a software raid6 of 11TB. A friend that is really good at shell scripts knocked up an rsync based thing that could go thru the user trees of all my machines, currently itself, this box, and all my cnc stuff in the garage, several 3d printers, a total of 8 machines, soon to be 9, making a backup of /home/gene or /home/cnc since cnc is first user on the pi running my big but old Sheldon lathe. This draws around 15 watts idling, up to 19 watts running, and does it all in 28 or 29 minutes. So that is something else these pi clones can do, and do very well. I've run it 7 or 8 times in two weeks, adding another 3d printer to the $systems list each time. Its used 4% of the 11TB so far. Using rsync the only expansion in storage is the backup copy of any file thats been changed since the last run. I love doing odd stuff like this just to see if it can be done. And it has succeeded beyond my expectations. That rpi4b running that lathe was another such "project". Started with an rpi3b which wasn't quite fast enough but its been running for over a decade, almost a decade since I switched it to a rpi4b. There, when the lathe is off, linuxcnc controls that too, the pi and monitor show as a 23 watt load. Whats not to like?

bringing up a BIG 3d printer from square one on a bpi--m5 with a fairly new image. The pager requires 10 or more mouse clicks, starting with the _ . . . . . at the upper left corner of what I think is the default xfce4 screen. All the eye candy and mouse clicks to actually switch workspaces are very distracting when one is trying to configure klipper. Can all this be reduced to a single click on the dot representing that workspace in the micro-pager? The eye candy is impressive to visiting frogs, until its a PITA when actually doing work. We buy these things in 6 pack qty's to do work, and give you a small monthly support, but impressing the frogs is maybe .0000002% of the time spent as I don't invite the frogs in to see my printer farm very often.

I've tried several recent releases back to bookworm, but the minute I turn apt loose to bring it up to date with a new kernel, in the last case 6.12.59, all /dev/sd* stuff disappears. WTH? I've been contributing to this project for several months

So how do I totally disable so access once logged in doesn't timeout in 5 minutes putting machine in sleep mode which disables remote access too? At 16 watts, it can run 24/7/365.25 doing its job which is as a backup server. Thanks all.

That seems to have gone away. ? SNILMERG... Now using very small but 1920x1080 screen, xfce terminal text is about 7 microns tall, way too small for my ancient eyes, Simplified keyboard. ctrl&shift&+ magnify's text but when big enough to read, bottom of xfce4 terminal is offscreen below bottom of screen, so cannot see command line. Is there a keycode combo that expands text independently from terminal window size? Thank you.

bananaoi-m5, Armbian 25.8.1 bookworm installed I can login via ssh as first user, gene, and sudo -i just fine. Buuuttttttt, at reboot the local screen ask's for the pw for amandabackup, a user lock down tightly which has never had a pw assigned. as its intended to be pw--less for the amanda backup system. What miss-configure can cause this????? Also I ordered 2 more of the keyboard/mouse combo''s which are the same as I'm using with a similar install for klipper running a 3d printer, but the dongle doesn't init when plugged in ack dmesg output, refusing its on discovery assigned address. So no keyboard/mouse is locally possible. I'll unpack the 2nd identical copy and see if its also broken. Switching back to an ultra- micro sized keyboard with a touchpad mouse works fine. And the second keyboard/mouse works as expected. The pw gizmo ask's for amandabackup's pw, I gave it my first user pw which it accepted logging me in normally. So I typed whoami and it responded gene. So wth is confusing the login requester????????? Many Thanks for any assistance. And why do I have to say solved in order to post when its not solved?? Counter productive to other readers.

I dropped back to Armbian_24.5.1_Bananapim5_bookworm_current_6.6.31_xfce_desktop.img and while it working, the boot find order of the drives is still random, no two boots is a row report the same lsblk order of disk vs sd* assigbnents. Only by using LABELS have I succeeded in getting them (7 drives) mounted in /etx./fstab. After that dated install an apt upgrade spent about an hour updating 270 some pkgs Just tried to get some of the other partitions mounted and usable, using LABEL= to ID them, got 2 of the 3 on a 1T toshiba drive, but found swapoff -a works, but swapon -a does not, won't even restore whats found at boot. This is from fdisk, also a reboot changed /dev/sdd into /dev/sdb Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sdb: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors Disk model: MQ01ABD100V Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x481e1363 Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sdb1 2048 102402047 102400000 48.8G 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 102402048 1748725759 1646323712 785G 83 Linux /dev/sdb3 1748725760 1953523711 204797952 97.7G 82 Linux swap / Solaris but its not swapon-able, note the dos disklable, it s/b gpt, it was done with gparted. ?????? Is there a conversion utility to make gpt or should I wait on working keyboard/mouse kit and let gparted blow it away? So I did, changed 3 parts to 2 and refornatted both and found that swapon should use label's but fails and the reboot to do that moved the toshiba drive from /dev/sdb to /dev/sdd. Howinhell can I stabilize tiis?????

close investigation it seems to use grub, not bootp, card written does not show any activity of green led even after 10 minutes from powerup. Do you have some of the magic twanger needed to boot a pi? Thank you, gene1934

finally must have hit the target on the automount vs /etc/fstab, for future reference, I added: /dev/mapper/myvg-striped_logical_volume /dm-0 gfs2 defaults 0 1 to /etc/fstab & rebooted twice to be sure.

back to the 15TiB lvm, what can I put in /etc/fstab to make it mount automatically on boot, with RH's public version of gfs2 for a file system It mounts just fine from the cli with a pretty simple "mount -t gfs2 /dm-0" as root of course. giving a df report of: /dev/mapper/myvg-striped_logical_volume 16104789168 1057496 16103731672 1% /dm-0 Thanks a bunch. gene1934

Android? heard of it, never used it. Don't even have an operational hell-fone, chip expired years ago. root@amanda:~# uname -a Linux amanda 6.12.32-current-meson64 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Jun 4 12:43:54 UTC 2025 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux This thing is being put together to run amanda, the backup program from ancient unix history, used at CERN and numerous large medical facility's. Runs fine on wintel hdwe but has now been recompiled for arm64's. I'll put a gpt table on it and format it to ext4 & hope it reboots. Thanks a bunch, Steeman.

won;t that blow away those 2 4meg boot0 and boot1 locations that lsblk see's? What are they used for? Thank you eselarm

humm mounted it w/o formatting, ran df didn't show, and didn't reboot, had to power it down & took double the normal time to reboot. on reboot looks ok mmcblk0 appears to be the 128G u-sd card as / and mmcblk1 179:32 0 14.6G 0 disk mmcblk1boot0 179:64 0 4M 1 disk mmcblk1boot1 179:96 0 4M 1 disk appears to be the eMMC chip, however inspecting it with fdisk does not show the sub parts, only root@amanda:~# fdisk /dev/mmcblk1 Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.39.3). Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them. Be careful before using the write command. Device does not contain a recognized partition table. Created a new DOS (MBR) disklabel with disk identifier 0x75f202df. Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/mmcblk1: 14.56 GiB, 15634268160 bytes, 30535680 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x75f202df is it safe to format to ext4? Thank you eselarm

that would be "mmcblk1 179:0 0 14.6G 0 disk" So should be usable if placed in /etc/fstab? whole output of lsblk in bulky: root@amanda:/# lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk ├─sda1 8:1 0 48.8G 0 part /buildbot ├─sda2 8:2 0 785G 0 part /hold └─sda3 8:3 0 97.7G 0 part [SWAP] sdb 8:16 0 3.6T 0 disk └─sdb1 8:17 0 3.3T 0 part └─myvg-striped_logical_volume 251:0 0 15T 0 lvm /mnt sdc 8:32 0 3.6T 0 disk └─sdc1 8:33 0 3.3T 0 part └─myvg-striped_logical_volume 251:0 0 15T 0 lvm /mnt sdd 8:48 0 3.7T 0 disk └─sdd1 8:49 0 3.3T 0 part └─myvg-striped_logical_volume 251:0 0 15T 0 lvm /mnt sde 8:64 0 3.7T 0 disk └─sde1 8:65 0 3.3T 0 part └─myvg-striped_logical_volume 251:0 0 15T 0 lvm /mnt sdf 8:80 0 3.6T 0 disk └─sdf1 8:81 0 3.3T 0 part └─myvg-striped_logical_volume 251:0 0 15T 0 lvm /mnt mmcblk1 179:0 0 14.6G 0 disk mmcblk1boot0 179:32 0 4M 1 disk mmcblk1boot1 179:64 0 4M 1 disk mmcblk0 179:96 0 119.1G 0 disk └─mmcblk0p1 179:97 0 117.9G 0 part /var/log.hdd / zram0 250:0 0 1.8G 0 disk [SWAP] zram1 250:1 0 50M 0 disk /var/log zram2 250:2 0 0B 0 disk root@amanda:/# but what are the next 2 4meg boot0 & boot1 used for? uboot pointers? or?? Thank you eselarm

There is several gigabytes of eMMC memory prepasted on the bpi-m5 that I would like to train amanda's database to use as its a heck of a lot faster & longer lasting than the 128G u-sd it is booting from. What is the procedure to mount it and make it usable as r/w memory?