Recently (relatively) I was going through some video recommendations and came across a video describing on how to host a website on a Raspberry Pi from just about anywhere including while traveling (like hotel WIFI or a mobile hotspot).
HakByte: Learn Web Hosting on Your Raspberry Pi with Dataplicity
Checking out the dataplicity site, the service is intended for management of IoT devices by making it convenient to connect to them wherever, without needing to jump through a lot of hoops (like configuring firewalls). I had a spare Raspberry Pi so why not give this a try and I went about setting it up.
The setup process is really simple, I am not going to spell it out here since the documentation is really clear – set up the Pi, connect it to the internet, run the script. Once complete, the Pi shows up in a dashboard letting one connect to the terminal or providing a randomized URL to connect with a web browser.
Terminal and URL
Once the Pi is reporting to the console and the URL is created then the next step is to create the website on one’s favorite webserver, which is a lesson for another time. All said, when finished, I did not really feel this would be useful as I thought for anything I might need, but I left the Pi online while deciding what to do… maybe I will put a model train online or something.
When I got my first computers BBS’s were the way to talk to other nerds with a computer (outside of a big corporate building that is). I mostly missed out on that since the numbers were always long distance and this was an era which long distance was billed separately. A few months back I was reminded these were a thing and wondered if I could set one up.
After a bit of research I went with the Mystic BBS mostly because it was ran on Linux, was relatively easy to setup and operate, and (most importantly) was still being developed. There is honestly not much to it as of the writing of this but “Fallingstuff’s BBS Fun House” is a thing and is online – for the moment, as it is hosted on a service that is best used for short term development things it may or may not stay a thing.
If you want to join in the fun, telnet to bbs.fallingstuff.net port 2323 to join house.
Building onto Parting the Disk we can see how DiskPart might be applied to clean up drives BEFORE selling or throwing away a machine. I did not have a machine convenient to test the cleaning of drives, but I DID have a Windows 10 Install USB, so that will have to do for the purposes of this test…
First, looking at the drive in explorer there are files present. I am going to skip the highly technical part where ‘files in explorer we see are pointers to the actually data” in favor of “deleting the picture does not make the file disappear completely. To prove that the files are not actually removed, I am going to look at the drive in a hex editor which will show the bits on the drive, the actual data and more than the picture in the file explorer.
Start off with files like this hereUnder a Microscope (Hex Editor)And another …And a third …
Now, we see we have files and data, so now comes DiskPart and use the clean command, and see what we have left in the same spots as before …
First spot, still stuff …Second position … still here …Third position … yep, there is still stuff here too …
So, even after ‘cleaning’ the drive the bits are still present, which means that even though we do not see files when we look at the drive in Explorer, they can be put together some way. Now for giggles, we know that if we create a partition now on this “empty” drive there will be no files … but will the data still exist that could be recovered? Again, we DiskPart and this time run the commands to Create Partition Primary.
This looks just a little bit different …This one looks really similar …… and so does this one …
From the looks of it, part of the data looks different – meaning the files are “missing”, but the actual bits of the data are still left behind. This means that the bits could be recovered and the files put back together … not a great cleaning method. Maybe there is another way the drive could REALLY be cleaned …
Looking at the drive in explorer there are files present. I will still skip going into the highly technical part where ‘files in explorer we see are pointers to the actually data” in favor of “deleting the picture does not make the file disappear completely. To prove that the files are not actually removed, I am going to look at the drive in a hex editor which will show the bits on the drive, the actual data and more than the picture in the file explorer.
Start off with files like this hereUnder a Microscope (Hex Editor)And another …And a third …
Now, we see we have files and data, so now comes DiskPart and use the cleanall command, and see what we have left in the same spots as before …
This looks a little different …Whoa, nothing here …Nothing here either …
Judging by the fact that there is a whole lot of zeros there, the drive is clean and data irretrievable, so if I did want to save something off there … I cannot anymore. For now, this wraps up my ranting about DiskPart and how it can clean up files you do not want people to find. I wanted to look at this myself for a while, and hopefully it helped out and now second-hand drives will be clean from now on.
So I had a thought the other day, back when the Windows 10 launched, Microsoft allowed users with Windows 7 to upgrade their computers to Windows 10 without having to pay for an upgrade. Supposedly this upgrade ability was turned off, but has it? I have a Windows 7 laptop let us find out …
Take a Windows 7 Home machine The upgrade process is launched from a Windows 10 USB install instead of a downloaded installPerforming checks …Getting things ready is a good sign …Accepting the terms and conditionsAm I ready to install? Yes…Confirming the settings and what to migrate.
At this point of the process I am convinced that if the upgrade engine were to bail out because the upgrade to 10 was no longer supported, it would have done it by now.
Out with the Windows 7 and in with the Windows 10 …Windows 10, upgraded and activated…
So the answer is yes, the upgrade process does still work despite the fact that Windows 11 has become a thing and being actively pushed out by Microsoft. I have updated several laptops in the last year or so and it has worked well every time, safe to say … the upgrade process has not been disabled.
As we know, Windows 11 came out with some serious system requirements… requirements that a lot of family computers just do not have the resources for meaning a lot of new computers will be bought in the next few years, or does it? The fact is that it may still be the case that new computer will need to be purchased, but maybe there is a way to squeeze a little bit more life out of that old computer and still try Windows 11.
To be honest I really expected this to be a lot more difficult, but it turns out that there are a huge number of ways to bypass the system requirement check. Posts from XDA Developer and Make Use Of have mostly the same methods, except for probably the easiest method, found on the Make Use Of site – simply copy over the install ESD from 11 to 10.
To complete this I built 2 USB drives using the media creation tool for Windows 10 to create one USB drive and the creation tool for Windows 11 to create a second USB with Windows 11; using a larger 16GB drive for the Windows 10 more about that here in a minute. The tools take a few minutes to build out the drives and when complete you have a USB drive for installing Windows 11 and a second for Windows 10. Just to be see what the failure looks like, boot up to the Windows 11 drive …
Can’t run Windows 11
Now we know what message comes out when the hardware is not Windows 11 compatible, time for the last step in this process. Copy the install.esd file from the sources folder of the Windows 11 USB and copy to the sources folder of the Windows 10 USB.
Install.esd
In the above I renamed the original ESD file before copying the Windows 11 one over – just as a precaution, but you can just as easily replace the one on the Windows 10 drive with the one from the Windows 11 drive. From there, just boot up to the Windows 10 drive with the Windows 11 ESD and proceed with install.
Installing normally
The Windows 10 installer puts down the Windows 11 bits and configures without any other warnings or error (at least from the Windows perspective). Once the installer finishes (if there were no other errors) the machine will be left on the Windows 11 OOBE (Out Of Box Experience) screen just waiting for someone to log in!
A few years ago I was looking for a new backup solution as I had outgrown the dual drive network storage I was using and since said drive network storage had also just failed. That is when I found some videos on Unraid and made the jump. … This post has taken me way too long to write. I think I started off planning to write a long thesis on Unraid, but Unraid is actually pretty straightforward and does exactly what it says on the package – build a storage server out of more or less anything.
I have been using Unraid for some time now, I started off with a Dell PowerEdge T20 and filled it up with as many drives as I could. That worked very well for some time (a good year or 2) until I found I had more drives than the little server chassis would hold, so I upgraded to a consumer Asrock board and a low end consumer AMD processor. The upgrade was as simple as moving the data and USB drives from the Dell chassis to the case with the Asrock board and then reconnecting and powering up the whole lot again. All the drives and storage were recognized and nothing was lost especially since I had mismatched hard drive sizes – a cool feature for Unraid, not all the drives of the storage array have to be the same size.
One would think consumer hardware would not be good for a 24/7 storage server but it turned out to be super stable, until I ignored a failed drive … and had a second drive fail. If the storage had been configured as a RAID 5, or something along those lines the array would have been lost along with the data, however this did not happen. The loss of 2 drives definitely put the whole data set down until they were replaced, but not all the data was lost – only what was stored on those 2 failed drives, the data on the rest of the array was safe and came back when fresh drives were put in.
Since that time I added extra parity drives to handle multiple drive failures, swapped out the consumer motherboard for server board and Xeon CPUs, and even expanded the array with larger drives with no major failures to report. The server runs as my backup and network data storage, Plex server, NFS ISO storage for virtualization servers among other roles as needed without any noticeable headaches. There is some cost associated with Unraid, but I highly recommend it (not a paid shill) for the ease and flexibility of the software – one can start off with a less expensive license to get started and upgrade as more drives are needed – really handy and really useful.
The other day I went to use some tools I have hosted in my home lab Docker instance, and found out that the server hosting the instance had an unrecoverable crash. I tried a few attempts to recover the server but ended up deciding to just rebuild the server … and this time make some notes on my server setup and install of Portainer.
The Docker instance itself is hosted on an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS server virtual machine running on a ProxMox cluster. The initial setup is fairly straight forward, I accepted the default partitioning, gave the VM a specific hostname (.. like one I could remember easily), fed it a username and password for my account, and installed OpenSSH – the typical server install stuff. The one thing I shortcut I took during the install was to select the Docker Server Snap during the setup prompts.
Installing Docker at build time is really just easier, not saying that installing after build is impossible … just has a few more steps than a check box. After selecting the Server Snap above then it was just a matter of sitting back and waiting till the installer said it was time for a reboot.
After the reboot, the server is ready to go complete with Docker. There are three containers I throw onto the completed system. The first is Portainer, which is more basically like a graphical front end for installing other containers. I use the community install and the setup is only a handful of Docker instructions (over a SSH terminal below).
With Portainer deployed I throw on instances of Heimdall dashboard and Uptime Kuma to keep track of shortcuts to launch tools and systems and to monitor various health and uptimes. Both of these I deploy using the Portainer web interface.
And with that a working Docker setup and ready to link tools and monitor health. This is just scratching the surface of Docker, there will be plenty of Docker adventures in the future, but this is a good start – a graphical interface to make container deployment easier (command line is still always an option) and a pair of tools for day to day use.
I had this laptop gaming laptop with a keyboard that was flaking out, a column of keys would just stop responding. Replacing the keyboard would require just about dismantling the entire machine so I was hesitant to do this when I could just try reloading Windows … Reloading the factory OS did not work, plus the CPU was JUST below the limit for Windows 11 so maybe a replacement is closer than I planned. At the end of the day though, a $25 replacement keyboard and about an hour of work later (repairing your own stuff is VERY awesome) I have a working Windows 10 gaming laptop again.
Now, I am not ready to replace this laptop just to get Windows 11, its been with me for a while and I put a lot of research in to make sure I got just what I wanted before buying it. So I decided that if I can hack around the bare metal requirements, surely I can get around the upgrade requirements too … To probably no one’s surprise, getting around the hardware upgrade requirements is not that hard either, a minute or so of google-fu and I land on a how to guide and I am off to the races (full disclosure – these pictures are from another laptop, but the process went the same).
Just to make sure that Microsoft did not change the system requirements to let more machines upgrade I run the upgrade assistant and …
Upgrade assistant still says no, well it was worth a try. Time to give upgrading from the build media a try, that will probably say no to upgrading too, but let us just make sure.
As expected, upgrading from Media is also blocked. So referring to the guide, I plug in the Windows 11 USB into another machine and find the appraiserres.dll and I rename the file it to appraiserres.dll.old – the guide says to just replace the file but I always like to leave a way to reverse a change that I make.
The next step is to mount up a Windows 10 ISO and copy over the appraiserres.dll from the sources folder to the Windows 11 USB.
With that done, I put the USB back into the machine to upgrade and run the setup again, and …
Success, upgrade unlocked and with a few clicks of Next and one Install the upgrade process is running and updating the machine. I let the machine sit and upgrade since this laptop is not exactly fast. I came back to the machine the next day and the upgrade was successful.
Just replacing a dll really does give a lot evidence to the fact that Windows 11 is just Windows 10 with a new coat of paint, that will sadly make for a lot of eWaste in another year or so. However, with that upgrade out of the way, these laptops will last for a while longer and not have to be immediately thrown into the trash.
“What is the Dos utility that allow you to partition a hard drive?” Without a doubt, this one question kept me from getting a job with the Geek Squad back when it rolled into the Best Buy stores. Looking back, yeah, I still do not feel bad about not getting that job.
I do have a twinge of remorse though from a short time back while I was working on some retro machines. I had some smallish, older hard drives (around 120gig) drives that I decided would work as portable drives for moving files to and from old machines (Windows 98). I was quickly reminded only after moving the drives to enclosures, that Windows 10 cannot format volumes over 30GB with FAT32. Thanks Microsoft. Now, there are 3rd party tools that can do this but I knew it was possible without them.
I plugged the drives into the Windows 98 machine and … did not get much farther. Well, since the tools in today’s Windows cannot do the job, time to break out the time machine and go back in time to dust off those dos tools and break out fdisk.
First, we need a command line as fdisk is a dos utility and does not have a graphical interface (unlike disk management in Windows 10). A bit of Start run magic …
“Command Line”
Entering in fdisk in the command prompt gets into the program and the first question to answer
Enable large disk support?
Large disk support turned on and at the main menu. Before going much further, let us check the current partitioning and switch to the drive we need to work on
Display partitionsChange drive
New drive selected, no current partitions on it … Perfect! Time to create a new partition then.
Create DOS partition …… and make it a primary …… and use the whole drive.
We have a primary partition the size of the second hard drive, but we are not able to put any files on the drive yet since it is not formatted yet. Unlike preparing a drive on a system today, Windows 98 and earlier required the machine to be restarted to pick up the new partitions / drives. Then once rebooted …
A Second Hard Drive!!one quick format …formatted hard drive
Behold, a formatted hard drive! Of course there are a lot more things fdisk can do, but those are beyond what I needed right now, which was to add that second hard drive to use to store stuff. Now that the second drive is created and blank, time to put things on it.
Not too long ago I wrote a post about fdisk and how that tool came in handy when creating some drives for copying files to and from a retro Windows system. So let us roll the clock forward to something more modern, and a tool that I use regularly to prepare drives for installing (or imaging) modern Windows or to create USB drives to get those installs started. Available sometime around the Windows 2000 days, DiskPart simplifies the process of partitioning and formatting drives by putting all the steps into a single tool. Plus, no reboots required. We start DiskPart from an elevated command prompt – DiskPart requires elevation to do its work.
Once it gets started, as shown by the prompt changing, DiskPart can list the storage drives connected to the machine with the “List Disk” command (shortened here to ‘lis dis’).
DiskPart reports two drives connected to this machine (it is a Virtual Machine, but the prompts will look the same on a physical machine). The first, larger one, is the hard drive of the virtual machine. The second one is a USB drive plugged into the VM. Since this is something I have had to explain more than a few times, let us go ahead and clean that USB drive – a simple process that starts off with selecting the drive.
Once selected, then we Clean.
Clean is a quick process that just removes the partitioning in preparation to be repartitioned and formatted. It is important to note that just a clean will not get rid of all the data left on the drive. Now that we have a ‘clean’ drive we have to create a partition we do that by telling DiskPart to Create a Primary Partition or Create Partition Primary (shortened in the image to “Cre Par Pri”).
We have a single partition, now lets give it something we can put files on with the format command, and quickly. We do this with the command Format quick with NTFS, or better put Format quick fs=ntfs.
Most of the time, once formatted Windows will give the new drive a drive letter and open it up to show a blank file explorer. In the event that it does not, DiskPart can push that drive letter along with the Assign command.
This was a quick introduction into a tool that prepares a drive for use in a (Windows) computer or cleans it up from too much junk. Hopefully this was useful, while I would think most computer folks would have this process memorized – we all need a refresher from time to time. We just scratched the surface with this post, I would encourage anyone interested to jump in and start looking closer – especially the list commands. Going the route in this post is not the most secure route, but I have a post planned for the future that will dive deeper into using DiskPart to securely wipe a drive.
