gene1934

The puzzle seems to have resolved itself. I gave up and shut the printer off about 04:00 this morning and went to bed.  Got back up, powered it on about 08:30, and its all working, updating 304 pkgs right now.  It was rebooted at least 15 times as I worked last night w/o any affect.  What the hell is the diff between a reboot and a full powerdown of 4+ hours???  Did dd-wrt flush its cache of MAC addresses?  IDK. But w/o a global net, I was trapped, I could not DL the tools needed to troubleshoot. A very frustrating state of affairs.
 
I do not see anyplace where I could mark this as solved.

Gave up after half an hour or more unplugged it for 10 secs, booted normally on power up but slow due to fchecking every drive in it, around 25Tb found the settings and turned that excrement off.  Ignoring it to check. fix dinner, need a new cook, but I'd have to fire me.  I think I've got it  from here.  Thank you, a bunch, eselarm.

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.

solved: took an hour to get it right. yaml is a picky bitch about format but its working.  apt upgrading now.Thank you Igor.

up all night, finally got it working. list of stuff I did: download latest 2505 bookworm-xfce and reburn the u-us card 3 times. copied 40 entry /etc/hosts file from working machine. edit /etc/hostname to change it to unique name amanda, then make it immutable as that did not survive a reboot. rm 10-* in etc/netplan, rename armbian.yaml to 10-armbian.yam editing it as needed, and edit /etc/nsswitch.conf to make network setup start as "hostname files dns" rebooting after each stage. So hostname now stays at amanda, and nsswitch.conf works as ordered. I can ping yahoo.com in addition to my other local machines and have now updated 208 pkgs. rebooted looks ok. Now I can get back to making a 20T lvm out of 5 4T SSD's,  But first some breakfast and a shot of insulin, and a nap while the local weather settles, its poured piss out of a cowbarn boot most of the night.  Thank you for the links, they were educational.

I'm an id10t.  call in the St Bernards and drink the whisky yourselves.  It was the .config file it uses to make flash. Its not a pure text file. Blowing it away and doing a fresh make menuconfig fixed it
 
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on the next bpi5, I found the desktop switcher. its that absolutely meaningless jumble of pixels in the upper right corner of the lightdm login window.
Am I being overly cautious at not clicking on something that does not mean a thing o a new bee?