Mike Meredith

Linux Netplan: Making NICs “Optional”

 Computing, Linux, Working Notes  No Responses »
Oct 302021
 

Ever since adding a couple of additional network interfaces to my workstation I have had a problem with reboots – the systemd-networkd-wait-online.service service “lingers” as it waits for all of the NICs to come online (and fails). Not especially problematic as everything works fine after the boot process has finished, but it slows down reboots (which are slow enough on this rather complicated desktop) and gives me an amber ✗ in my window manager’s status bar.

After spending some time re-jigging my storage (which consisted of far too many reboots), I finally decided to fix it.

Which basically consisted of making the relevant NICs “optional” in netplan. :-

    enp9s0f1:
      dhcp4: false
      accept-ra: false
      addresses: [172.16.76.0/24]
      optional: true

This isn’t one of the NICs that I actually use – I added the NIC configuration in an earlier attempt at making things work … unsuccessfully. The key part is the “optional: true” bit.

And whilst you’re in there, replacing the gatewayv4 and gatewayv6 specifications with the “new style” is worth doing too :-

      routes:
        - to: default
          via: 192.0.2.1
        - to: default
          via: 2001:db8:9c2:dead::1

(No those aren’t the real addresses)

This can be activated in the usual way – with a netplan apply (in my case a netplan try isn’t effective because of the use of bridges), although in this particular case a full reboot is called for.

The Round Table

All! About! Apple’s! New! M1X! Processor!

 Computing  No Responses »
Oct 172021
 

All the details of Apple’s M1X processor! Here first! Before Apple has announced it!

Yes this is just click-bait. Just like all the other videos/posts/stories or whatever about Apple’s soon-to-be-announced (perhaps) ARM-based processor that supposedly scales up more than the original M1. It’s going to happen sometime (which is probably on the 18th – tomorrow at the time of writing).

So where does all the early speculation come from? In all probability it is nothing more than speculation and click-bait. You’re wasting your time clicking on this story no less and no more than checking out the others.

Except this one is honest about it being just click-bait.

The Naked Horseman

The Best Linux Distribution Is …

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Oct 162021
 

The one you’re running.

A bit of a simplistic answer but there’s a great deal of truth to it. It is too easy to get distracted by the new shiny and keep changing distributions. When the time could be far better spent just learning Linux – to a great extent all Linux distributions are the same. You can get Firefox (or whatever browser you prefer) with any of them; similarly LibreOffice is nearly always available. It’s the software you use on a daily basis that is important; not which distribution you’re using.

Similarly the desktop environment you use is selectable – this laptop has a distribution-specific flavour of GNOME, Awesome, Xmonad, and i3 (although I spend most of my time in Awesome). You might be able to tell something about my preferences for “desktop environments” from that list! A whole new desktop environment and a whole new look is just a quick software install away.

And a whole lot quicker and less disruptively than you can install a different distribution.

Different distributions offer different feature sets and different system administration commands (dpkg vs yum), but it isn’t that difficult to adjust to these differences especially when most of the time you are just using the computer to do real stuff rather than just managing it.

The Round Table

No, You Didn’t Pay for the Roads!

 General  No Responses »
Sep 202021
 

In the UK there is something known as “vehicle excise duty” which the owners of some motorised vehicles have to pay. Before 1937, this was paid into a road fund used exclusively to pay for the creation of the road network. But from that date, roads are funded out of general taxation and local council taxes.

Which means that everyone (or just about everyone) is paying for the roads and that is no bad thing – we all benefit to some extent (although the pollution is a bit of a drag).

Filthy Roaring Beasts Rushing Along The Scar

The interesting thing is that because local roads are locally funded (to an extent), there is a good chance that a pedestrian is paying more for the roads within a city than the car driver – the driver is more likely to be a visitor to the city and thus pays considerably less. So by the argument that whoever pays should have priority, it should be the pedestrian who does!

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