Jens Bauer

Agree completely, certainly Mickey Mouse, but then again I use them solely because I want to saturate the native 6G SATA when using sustained transfers. I know the JMB575 can only reach 500 "MB" per second (I don't know if those 500 "MB" are 1000-based or 1024-based), but it comes close enough for now and I have a fairly fast NAS+server, which didn't cost a huge amount of money. ... reading the rest of your post, I just went "agree", "agree", "agree", ... :) -Definitely interesting, those cages. I'll likely purchase some of these, because they're only around £45 each - then stack 10 and mount on its side as one 4U block. A quick search found them for £47 on amazon and £43 on alternate, they're also available on eBay. Until then, I have a stainless steel food tray (2nd hand store: £1), which I plan on cutting rectangular using an angle-grinder. Drill two rows of holes spaced 20mm and mount up to 10 drives in it. -I'm looking forward to JMS591, which is not yet released. It's a 6G SATA-to-SATA RAID-controller (5 devices), which does RAID0, RAID1, RAID5 and RAID10. I'm just shooting for RAID0 for now ("The riskier the road, the greater the profit.", RoA 62 - but one also have to bear RoA 48 in mind: "The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife."). In the beginning I used a lot of these 3-way splitters, but as I ran out, I decided to just cut the Molex-plugs off of these cables and add my own connectors on only the 5V and GND, leaving the 12V unconnected. -And yes, I also agree on the drives should not be powered by the board itself. Sadly, many people think this can't be done or is risky or dangerous, but in fact it's much worse not to do so. I was so close to purchasing the RockPro 64, but then the Raspberry Pi 4 came and I picked a few of those instead (because I want the four Cortex-A72). I'm still thinking about the RockPro 64 for a NAS; it's a pretty good board, just sad that I have to pay custom duties, which makes two of those cost the same as a MacchiatoBIN double-shot. The MacchiatoBIN has much higher priority for me, but still takes time to be able to afford.

If I had seen this post earlier, I would have replied - but I might as well reply now. When you use a Port Multiplier, make sure you on the device-side (eg. not the host-side, which points towards your board), use Port 0. Port 0 may be named "Port 3" on those cheap chinese PM boards (eg. on the 3G SATA boards they're named Port 3 - the port in the center of the board. You can boot from only that port, not from any of the other 4 ports. Thus if it doesn't work with "Port 3" and it doesn't say "Port 0" anywhere, just try one port at a time, you'll likely find it. On some of the boards, you'll see some small silkscreen text saying "Master", that also marks the "master port". On the board you link to, the master port is exactly Port 3, which is located in the center of the board. It's very good that your board has a heatsink as well, without it, the IC could overheat and die. If it was a StarTec PCIe Port Multiplier, it would likely be the same type I have. There are two double SATA connectors and one single connector between the two double-connectors. The single connector is the "master" or "Port 0". If booting works without a Port Multiplier, then it *should* work with the Port Multiplier - unless the USB3 adapter you're using are completely incompatible with FIS-based Port Multipliers. Note: I boot my EspressoBIN on its native 6G SATA via a Port Multiplier (both JMB321 and JMB575 works, though using a JMB321 will only allow you to get SATA2 speeds).

Bugger, I just realized that I linked to the wrong mPCIe riser card; I've corrected the above post now so it points to this riser card instead. The other card can likely still be used with the mPCIe riser card to make a 90 degree angle turn.

I'd assume so, since the topic is about the Raspberry Pi 4. :) I agree on that the early Raspberry Pi versions were not so interesting (which was why I got myself a CubieBoard2, which is now fried by power-spikes on the 230VAC). But today, looking at the Raspberry Pi 4 B, I'd say it might not be the top of the pop, but you can be sure that it's not the rough bottom either. It's not a bad purchase. If there's problems with the software, those problems might be fixable, whereas problems with hardware would be a bummer. The Raspberry Pi people have some experience and are improving each time they make a new design (because for one thing, they don't want to lose money on returns - noone would). If there's a bug in the firmware of a TV-box, it's a bit more difficult to fix, because you don't just write a new image to a microSD card, but you'll have to flash-program the TV-box. Granted, today there are some TV-boxes that can be re-flashed via SD-card (I know @balbes150 have worked with some amlogic boxes that can do this), but unfortunately it's not always easy. The software I used for flash-programming the CS918 (RockChip) was buggy, so it wrote to the first sector of the NAND more than 100000 times on the first go and ... this resulted in the NAND wearing out immediately. The author of the software could not find or fix the problem at the time being and the only other option I'd have would be to use the official Rockchip software, which only runs under Windows on an Intel-based computer - that was something I didn't have at the time. With all the right tools, things are usually easy, but getting those tools might not always be piece of cake.

I follow you on losing interest in the ARM-SoCs, but I do know the ICs are capable of what I want - I just wonder why noone can figure out how to pull all the benefits out of a CPU. :/ I just looked at eBay and found the 2.5GbE adapter there as well; slightly higher price, but accessible for those who don't have a company. Even though the price is higher, it's still not too bad and the product might be better than using two of Ugreen's. I've been using Port Multipliers (3G SATA JMB321 variants without heatsinks, but it seems they might overheat and die). Recently I found the 6G SATA variants with heatsinks for the same price; 3 pounds lower and I'd order one each week as it'd become duty-free for me then. (If you look for cheaper PMs, make sure you find some with heatsinks on them, as the chinese sellers like to state that they're 6G even though they use JMB321 - "yeh, you can attach a 6G drive to it, but that doesn't make it 6G"). BTW: I use 1TB WD-RED 2.5" for my RAID0; there are several reasons: 1: A 4TB 3.5" have several disks per drive, meaning if data are scattered, the arm will move more. 2: They use very little power: 0.2W stand-by and 1.4W read/write. 3: They produce very little heat, so I can easily keep my rack fanless. 4: They're silent. 5: They transfer 144000000 Bps sustained, which means 5 drives can easily saturate a 5 port PM. 6: They need only a 5V supply, which means I can make my own solar powered PSU easily. It seems you're located in the UK. If so, I'd like to recommend kenable when you purchase CAT6A, USB, HDMI and other cables, because I measured Kenable's cables and their resistance is very, very low compared to anything you get from China. The reason is that they use as pure copper as they can. Purchasing from them even saves me money, compared to purchasing from a danish web-store (including shipping from the UK!).

I think we're on the same page. I'm interested in saturating the I/O-interfaces as much as I can. I use hard drives and not SSD (I've already heard some screams about SSD data destroyed because they got worn out; my WD hard drives have lasted for more than 12 years without failure now, so I'll stick with those). I ended up looking for Mini-PCIe-to-fullsize-PCIe riser cards and found one that might be worth purchasing. I haven't ordered anything yet, but such a card could allow me to add one of the cheap x1 PCIe2.0 cards with four 6G SATA ports. I think the more drives you have, the longer they'll last because load will be spread out on them, and what you (I) really want is to keep that PCIe interface flooded with data. On my Mac, I have a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot and want to find a x4 6G SATA RAID card, but that's also difficult even for full size PCIe. Marvell's 923x chips have only one or two lanes, so they can't spread the I/O out on four lanes. That means it's likely I want to look for a card that have two of those Marvell chips on it. I found something that came close, but I can't seem to find that bookmark right now (!) [I might just got for an ATTO or Areca, perhaps a SAS]. As for Ethernet, on my EspressoBIN, the max. throughput is 1Gbps, even though there are 3 ports on a 2.5GbE topaz switch. Quite annoying. -So I figured that since there's a USB3 connector which I use for nothing, I could likely go and add a few Ugreen adapters: One USB3-to-3xUSB3+1xGbE adapter Two USB3-to-1xGbE adapters That would give me 3 extra GbE ports and still room for attaching a keyboard or mouse on the unused USB3. Now some math... USB3 gives us max. 375MB/sec (clean) -but only if the hardware is designed right and the software as well. GbE is 1000000000 raw bits per second = 125000000 raw Bytes per second (no 8b/10b encoding! -This is because we clock 8 bits out on a 125MHz crystal). 125000000 / 1024 / 1024 = 119.2 MB/sec. This is the raw throughput, which we add to the 375MB/sec from the USB, so we'll get around 494MB/sec. We end up with a fairly good balance between one 6G SATA port (491MB/sec) and four GbE ports (494MB/sec). I won't even consider using the fragile USB3 port for attaching a harddisk, which is why I chose it for GbE. No harm done if the network connection is lost, but if writing to the harddisk while losing the connection, you've likely damaged your data on one or more drive(s). Yes, I do believe Link Aggregation is something that can be done. I have one of the SG108E from TP-Link; it has 8 ports and supports LAG. It's fine as a toy, but if you want LAG on more than 3 ports, then you'll need a switch with 16 ports or more. I'm considering T1700G-28TQ for this; especially because it'll fit nicely with the MacchiatoBIN and have plenty of GbE ports for SBCs.

Note: Choice of filesystem is of course also important. A hashing CoW can save you a lot of transfer time, so it might be helpful to find a FS that supports this (I use BTRFS, but I've gathered that ZFS is a good choice too).

BTW: Using RAID0 efficiently removes the 'R' from RAID. I figured this is the right thing to do, because the 'R' is Redundant, this results in a fine usable AID.

When I build a RAID0 (for performance), I partition the drives, so that they have a "lot" of "small" partitions at the low sector count; those partitions will be the partitions that are used most often. My boot partitions do not count (they're not in RAID anyway), so I might have 3 small partitions for boot and boot-backup, then I'll have a swap partition on each drive. Because swap is auto-software-RAID0 under Linux, I generally do not combine the partitions as RAID, however, if you're using a hardware RAID0, then it will likely pay to do so. After the swap partition, I have my /var, where all the log files go. It's a small partition as well. Next partition is my build partition; this is where all the binary files go when I compile my sources. I usually make this 16GB for a 4 or 5 drive RAID0. A source-partition follows, which is twice the size of the build partition. Depending on what the purpose is, I usually put a git partition, a web partition or a mail partition next. When I've "spent" 80% of my drive-space, I make an "archive" partition, which is used as a cache for holding all my downloaded .bz2/.gz/.xz/.lz4/.7z files (I have a separate partition for transmission, which is a lower priority partition in the first 80% as it's large). The first part of the harddisk will read the fastest, since the lower sector numbers are the outermost. You can try this out easily by partitioning your drives into - say 7 partitions each (5%,60%,5%,5%,5%,15%,5%), then write a large zero-file on each of the 5% partitions and check the timing difference. I'm saying zero-file, because if using /dev/random, the random generator will interfere with your readings (it always waits for it on the Mac, where it's very, very, very slow). Also, if your RAID controller is connected via PCIe (which it would be the case with the 9235), then the PCIe bandwidth will limit the performance of the 4 ports. You won't be able to get 24Gbps 'raw'. At most, you'd be able to get 476.8 MB/sec 'raw' (1024-based) on a 5GT/s PCIe2.0 lane. But then PCIe protocols may take 5% of the cake and since SATA is 8b/10b encoded, you're already down to 461MB/sec. SATA also has some protocol overhead, which needs to be subtracted (as far as I recall, it's around 15%, but I'm not 100% sure). On a dedicated 6G SATA port, you shouldn't be able to get much above 491MB/sec (572.2MB/sec raw) [515000000 Bps, 600000000 Bps raw]. In my post, 'raw' means all the transport layer-, protocol layer- and other command-/control-data that wraps your data in safe packets. Some of my information might not be 100% accurate, but you can safely use the information to not get your hopes up above what's possible.

You can see some of the 'insides' if you scroll down, including something that looks like a LiPo battery ??!? -Anyway, the specs do not look too bad. I'd prefer a S922X, though. My problem is that there is no good SBC or TV-box that gives me what I want. -Well, that's actually a lie, because there's the MacchiatoBIN, it's exactly what I want, but it takes quite a while for me to get enough money for it. Its processor is *still* relevant today, even though it's 3 years old! But the EspressoBIN has been disaster-upon-disaster. When things break, I usually manage to get it working again, but it's so much work and travel usually cost as much as a good TV-box each time (so far it's cost as much as a RockPRO64). I figured that a TP-Link Archer v5 with OpenWRT beats the EspressoBIN by 3 lengths for routing alone (just wish it had a 6G SATA port).

I *never ever* purchase from Ali-anything again. gearbest, maybe. geekbuying, maybe. eBay, yes. amazon - if their shipping wouldn't cost more than the items I want, I might purchase from there. -But I purchased the Raspberry Pi via eBay, so it must be fair to compare purchasing a TV-box via eBay too. eBay offers free shipping from China, but that doesn't help much if the price is over $10, then customs are added and the price will sadly soon be too high. BTW: I got 10% discount on those Raspberry Pi's, so instead of paying $39.10 each, I paid only $38.54 each. Yes that *IS* 10% when cheatBait calculates it. -That's when using coupon codes. The way they can do it, is that they suddenly raise the value of Euro, Pounds or Dollars, then they won't lose so much on the discount. If you want to learn business, they know all about it.

I did that, but still no dice. Same problem as described in my post above. When I boot board number 2, the connection to board number 1 breaks. I have unique MAC addresses in all the 10-*.network files. In addition, I have unique MAC addresses in boot.cmd and armbianEnv.txt Still I can only have one EspressoBIN on the same network.

This didn't work for me. And I also changed them in boot.cmd and armbianEnv.txt, still didn't work; I still get the same annoying MAC -address. Further detail: I have connection to the first board until the second board reaches the systemd-networkd startup, then the connection to my first board freezes. Thus it's Network Manager that causes the problems. It would be real nice if part of the MAC address could be generated by some unique ID from the CPU or another IC on the board.

Problem is that a TV-box might cost you way more than $10000, even though its price-tag only says $20. https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/04/10/fcc-tv-box-fine-147000-dollars/ -But that aside, I'm no longer a techie, I'm sadly becoming a dumb average-joe now. I have a TV-box running Android 6.x I think it is; you already know that it's Linux with its arms and legs cut off, so it can do virtually nothing useful. The Raspberry Pi (whichever version) has a larger community than any TV-box will ever have. I never really liked Raspberry Pi - I've always seen it as a marketing-hype thing. But comparing the prices again. Let's say you're located in China, you'll have no problem getting a low-cost TV-box that probably serves you well. The Raspberry Pi will cost way more in China, because shipping has to be added. If you're in Europe and purchase any (any!) TV-box, you will have to pay duties. In Denmark you'll need to add the shipping price to the item value (TV-box is $20, shipping may be as low as $5, so you add those two numbers, then you multiply by 1.25 and get your final price. If that's above $171.65, then you'll have to multiply further by 1.05 ... 1.20, this is TAX). My $20 TV-box does not decode h.265 and it's advertised as 4K, but it can't even handle that. It *does* have GbE though. If you attach a USB-joystick in order to play games, you soon find out that it's impossible to control anything that way. You also find out quickly that a USB-keyboard won't work with Android, because they thought it very bright to remap the arrow-keys, so they control the mouse arrow instead. Enough to drive you crazy and never want to use a TV-box with Android again. All the games are made for mobile-phones, so they're absolutely useless on Android. Try a ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 or Atari ST emulator on the thing and see if you can use it for real. Thus you will not want to purchase a Raspberry Pi from China if you're in Europe. To make a fair comparison, my Raspberry Pi cost $39 including shipping from the UK to Denmark. If I had to purchase a $35 TV-box, it would cost me $43 and then I'd have to fiddle with hacking it to get it to run Linux. The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ does not reach the full 1Gbit/sec on ethernet, but it does decode h.265 and it does play video quite smoothly on my 1920x1080 display, no stuttering/chopping encountered yet. -All that said, I admire all the work you're doing with TV-boxes; I'm not at all against running Linux on TV-boxes and I think what you do is absolutely fantastic. :)

I don't care much for a 'nice box' anyway. But what I really dislike about TV-boxes is that they are "firmware upgradable", which means they might have made the support for firmware upgrade, but never release any new firmware. Thus you're always stuck with Android 0.21 if you're not a technical genious. -I've attempted to put Linux on a CS918 once. The RkFlashTool wore out my on-board NAND, so it's rotting somwhere in a box or a table or wherever I put it. I do think they'll be successful. It's not a top-of-the-class board, but it's not the worst you can get either. Most not-too-tech-savvy people will be able to get one of these boards up and running. I care not at all for USB3. It should never have been 'invented'. An absolutely maximum speed for 5Gbit USB3 of 375MB/sec says it all. USB has always been flakey / unreliable. Nah, gimme as many native SATA ports and PCIe slots instead, then I'll figure out what to do with them. =D As for the power supply problems - there'll probably be a few people having problems. Someone gave me a Dell laptop that wouldn't stay on (because the power supply didn't want to feed it, since the PSU thought that the battery was too old - horrible crap, never buy Dell). Personally I'll likely cut a USB-C male-to-male cable in two and make my own PSU. (My v4 boards will go into the 19" rack with nothing connected via USB anyway, so it'll likely draw less than 2A per board). Remember: You never, ever get what you pay for. You get 'up to' what you pay for.

I've had a cheap JMB321 port multiplier on my EspressoBIN for more than a year. I've used it with a BTRFS RAID0 configuration on two 1TB harddisks. This worked fine so far. The day before yesterday I added another 1TB drive. I added the first partition and balanced it. No problems. Next partition, same thing, no problems (this was my web-partition with all my web-sites. Balanced fine). Next partition was almost unused, added it and balanced it and ... segmentation fault. This is not the fault of BTRFS! No commands were available, I had no rootfs anymore. I rebooted the board, nothing. Started from SD, couldn't see anything but the SD-card. As it's unlikely the 5 harddisks that were all fried at the same time, I decided to switch out the Port Multiplier (always have a couple of spare ones in the drawer). Now I could see the drives again. Thus what happened was that when BTRFS started the balancing, the JMB321 overheated, because those cheap boards do not come with a heatsink. I did attach a heatsink to the spare one I had, so it'll postpone the problem for a while. Unfortunately the web and mail partitions were both destroyed (those were the ones I balanced). The other partitions are all intact and working. -So I do not recommend using those cheap Port Multipliers, but if you do, please do yourself a favour and add a heatsink or keep the PM-board in the fridge. Update: And never, ever use those cheap chinese SATA-cables that comes with the Port Multiplier - buy some that have a well-known quality brand on it. Also remember that SATA cables have a maximum mating count of 50 cycles (and no, they do not produce more SATA cables). And remember: Real men don't make backups. ... ...They cry.

Definitely better than any TV-box - and to get a decent TV-box, you'd have to pay way more. I've four 3 B+ ordered, which also beats most TV-boxes; one of these will replace my V88, thus I'll be sure not to be fined for EMI pollution as well. -So as you have probably guessed, I'm completely done purchasing TV-boxes. Update: The seller ran out of 3 B+, so he was kind enough to replace two boards with 1GB v4 models.

Have you checked that the voltage levels on the pins are compatible with the UART device you're connecting ? (I'm mentioning this, because most pins are 1.8V instead of 3.3V and some interfaces need voltage translation before they can be used. I have not checked the UART specs myself.)

You probably know that you're a bit off-topic, so I won't go into further details about that. :) This very much sounds like a handshake problem, such as ... * Bad connection (bad wiring, lose connection, etc.) * Incorrect timing on the UART interface * EMI problems (make sure your board is not near strong electrically generated magnetic fields, such as transformers, mobile phones, WiFi etc.) On the mentioned URL, did you notice this ... ... Looks very much like UART timing is off, which is likely what's wrong and why you sometimes almost succeed and sometimes it stops working immediately. You're likely on the right track, this kwboot thing just seems to be flakey. I'd try using another program for the uploading. As far as I understand, a standard serial terminal that supports Xmodem, will do fine. I'm sorry I can't be of more help, but I hope that you'll get the board up and running; it seems like a nice one; especially if you can modify it to support more than two drives.

For anyone coming across this thread due to having the same problems as I had, I'd like to say that I am not entirely sure where the problems were. This works for me: 1: Write Armbian_5.75_Espressobin_Ubuntu_bionic_next_4.19.20.img onto a micro-SD card. 2: Boot from the card 3: Make sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade 4: Reboot the EspressoBIN The ethernet interface now comes up and works as expected. You can install 4.19.20 on a harddisk partition of your choice. I am using ext4 for my rootfs and also have a 'thin' boot partition which only holds boot.scr and armbianEnv.txt; nothing more; this points to the actual boot partition (I wish I could use UUIDs for 'finding' the kernel, but haven't figured that one out yet). If you also have a boot partition, I recommend not loading the kernel and ramdisk from that partition, otherwise you will have to mount the boot partition each time you do a sudo apt upgrade - and if you forget, you're in trouble - this could have been the problem that I had, I am not sure. Reboot and poweroff seem to be very reliable now. I don't think I've had any hangs like I used to with Xenial. Thus as of writing this I'm in the (long) process of moving my server from Xenial to Bionic. I've also gotten myself a couple of extra USB-to-Ethernet adapters. One is a Ugreen USB3-to-GbE with a 3-port USB3-hub. I don't think this worked on Xenial, but it's detected on Bionic. I haven't yet gotten a link up on it, but it seems like it will work - I will have a look at this later.

On the page ... https://www.armbian.com/espressobin/ ... I'd like to request adding one line to the boot-environment variable setup: setenv image_name Image -Because on my firmware, it defaults to 'boot/Image' and thus results in ... Bad Linux ARM64 Image magic! -But after I set it to 'Image', it boots. (and finally it seems I can boot Bionic after an update!)

Which board are you using ?

I'm not really keen on running Debian. Partly because I'm already running a complete Xenial setup on my "production server" and wouldn't like to switch. Besides, things look kinda more promising now than a few months ago, since I've actually been able to get some network availability from 'nothing'. I'm pretty sure that someone who knows more about Linux networking than me, would know how to easily fix the 4 mentioned issues. I've been practicing a little with nmcli (not at all experienced with this tool), and have gotten slightly further; none of the issues have been fixed, though. Using nmcli, I've been able to add an IP-address/range, a gateway and two ipv4.dns addresses to 'bond0'. I still have to do all this by hand every time, so at the moment I've switched back to an earlier version of Bionic, since I'm using the board as a file server too.

I had another go at Armbian_5.68_Espressobin_Ubuntu_bionic_next_4.19.12.7z and had some progress: This is exactly what happens on first boot, right after a clean installation. Let's try and resolve a domain name $ systemd-resolve google.com google.com: resolve call failed: Failed to activate service 'org.freedesktop.resolve1': timed out (service_start_timeout=25000ms) So it didn't work; Let's get some status information on systemd-resolve $ systemd-resolve --status Failed to get global data: Connection timed out Seems it's not paying attention, now let's see which version is installed $ apt policy systemd Installed: 237-3ubuntu10.9 Candidate: 237-3ubuntu10.9 Version table: *** 237-3ubuntu10.9 500 500 http://ports.ubuntu.com bionic-security/main arm64 Packages 500 http://ports.ubuntu.com bionic-updates/main arm64 Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status 237-3ubuntu10 500 500 http://ports.ubuntu.com bionic/main arm64 Packages Try and re-activate it $ sudo systemctl restart systemd-resolved.service Now let's try and resolve a domain name $ systemd-resolve google.com google.com: resolve call failed: No appropriate name servers or networks for name found The error-message has changed, we probably had some progress, let's see if we have a DNS address $ grep -v '#' /etc/systemd/resolved.conf [Resolve] DNS=1.1.1.1 Not exactly what I wished for, so back up resolved.conf and replace by OpenDNS # cd /etc/systemd # cp -n resolved.conf resolved.conf.orig # echo -e "[Resolve]\nDNS=208.67.222.222" >resolved.conf # systemctl restart systemd-resolved.service Check if the changes took place $ systemd-resolve --status | grep 'DNS Server' DNS Servers: 208.67.222.222 Let's see if we can ping our gateway $ ping 10.0.0.1 connect: Network is unreachable Looking at the LED on the WAN port's 8P8C, only one LED is turned on $ ip link | grep wan 5: wan@eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000 Try turning on the LED on the WAN port # ip link set wan up (could also use: # ifconfig wan up) both 8P8C LED lights are now on, let's see the changes $ ip link | grep wan 5: wan@eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000 OK, now see if we can look up a domain name $ systemd-resolve google.com google.com: resolve call failed: No appropriate name servers or networks for name found Still no luck, try and see if we can ping the gateway $ ping 10.0.0.1 connect: Network is unreachable OK, let's add an ip-address to the WAN interface and see if that helps # ip addr add 10.0.1.2/8 dev wan $ ping 10.0.0.1 Now pings get through, let's try and see if we can make a domain name lookup $ systemd-resolve google.com google.com: resolve call failed: All attempts to contact name servers or networks failed No dice, but I can SSH into the EspressoBIN board from another computer, so I have network, but the resolver is not working. Issues: Network is not brought up by default. Resolving does not work out-of-the-box. IP address does not survive a reboot, thus no servers can start up at boot. Resolver still does not work, even after getting the network up and running, thus I can not install software via 'apt'. I do not know how to get any further from here, but hopefully this is helpful to someone.

I just tried installing Armbian_5.68_Espressobin_Ubuntu_bionic_next_4.19.12.7z but ... Now there's absolutely no network at all. Earlier I had to do an 'apt update; apt upgrade' in order to make it impossible to connect to anything. Now, if I install Bionic, I have no network right from the start; I do not need to do anything. Have anyone succeeded in getting network on Bionic (after doing an 'apt upgrade') the past 3 months ?