homelab

I run pacman -Syu about once a week on my Arch Linux machines, to stay up-to-date, avoid security problems and generally stay at the bleeding edge of software revisions.

Today, I ran pacman -Syu on my Dell R530 server and it updated the PPP package.

Trouble ensued.

I used to try to do one dumb/weird hardware thing every year. One year, I used a Palm Pilot as a serial terminal for a Sun SPARCStation-10. Multiple serial cable adapters and gender changers involved.

My dumb hardware stunt for October 2024: 10 USB WiFi adapters on the same laptop.

I bought a TP-Link powerline ethernet starter kit.

After a reboot of my new server, the Kea DHCP server did not respond to DHCPDISCOVERs or DHCPREQUESTs

After I upgraded my WRT3200ACM router to OpenWRT v23.05.3, my laptop took minutes to get an IPv4 address when connected to my WRT3200ACM router’s WiFi. It only takes seconds to get an IPv4 address when connected to my other WiFi.

I ended up downgrading OpenWRT on the WRT3200ACM, but first I did a lot of work trying to track down the problem.

After I upgraded to OpenWRT 23.05.3, my Linksys WRT3200ACM WiFi router seems to interact poorly with my Dell E7470 laptop. It takes many tens of seconds for that laptop to acquire an IPv4 address via DHCP.

I decided to downgrade OpenWRT Linux on the router from 23.05.3 to 19.07.10. I believe it was running 19.07 before I started on my sysadmin journey of switching to a new server.

I’ve had an interest in accurate timekeeping and NTP, the Network Time Protocol for quite a while.

At one time or another over the years, I’ve run the original ntpd, xntpd, and OpenNTPD. I currently have the chrony NTP server running on my old server, to aggregate NTP needs on my home network.

I decided to try the kea DHCP daemon on my production server.

My Arch Linux laptop started rebooting when I closed the lid and re-opened it.

As Ben Franklin noted, “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources”. So it was with this problem.