Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2024-07)
Updated 2024-09-13 20:47 GMT.By Damon Hart-Davis.
2024-07-29: ConnectBot
I just set up ConnectBot (an SSH client) on my Android phone.
I am getting flashbacks to Nokia Communicator days (!), dialling in from who-knows-where to fix system things at 9600bps!
2024-07-11: RSS Plague
Maybe there should be a plague on both their houses / servers! (I am looking at you Google-Podcast
and Podbean
.)
% egrep rss/podcast /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log | tail [12/Jul/2024:16:07:02 +0000] "HEAD /rss/podcast.rss HTTP/1.1" 503 3539 "-" "Google-Podcast" [12/Jul/2024:16:07:02 +0000] "GET /rss/podcast.rss HTTP/1.1" 503 3859 "-" "Google-Podcast" [12/Jul/2024:16:07:08 +0000] "HEAD /rss/podcast.rss HTTP/1.1" 503 3539 "-" "Google-Podcast" [12/Jul/2024:16:07:09 +0000] "GET /rss/podcast.rss HTTP/1.1" 503 3859 "-" "Google-Podcast" [12/Jul/2024:16:07:16 +0000] "HEAD /rss/podcast.rss HTTP/1.1" 503 3539 "-" "Google-Podcast" [12/Jul/2024:16:07:17 +0000] "GET /rss/podcast.rss HTTP/1.1" 503 3859 "-" "Google-Podcast" [12/Jul/2024:16:07:25 +0000] "GET /rss/podcast.rss HTTP/2.0" 503 388 "-" "Podbean/FeedUpdate 2.1" [12/Jul/2024:16:07:27 +0000] "GET /rss/podcast.rss HTTP/2.0" 503 388 "-" "Podbean/FeedUpdate 2.1" [12/Jul/2024:16:07:28 +0000] "GET /rss/podcast.rss HTTP/2.0" 503 388 "-" "Podbean/FeedUpdate 2.1" [12/Jul/2024:16:07:38 +0000] "GET /rss/podcast.rss HTTP/2.0" 503 388 "-" "Podbean/FeedUpdate 2.1"
2024-07-10: RSS Referer
I was filtering 406
/ 429
/ 503
rejection of bad RSS feed bot on the Referer
header being absent. But I have not seen one non-bot client using it recently, and some bots that do, so I have eliminated it as a screening test.
2024-07-05: MIDI Album ZIPs
I have just extended the sonification script to generate collated versions of all the auto-generated standard energy MIDI files (albums?) as ZIP files. I am creating a ZIP with everything, and separate ZIPs with just monthly/yearly stuff in them. In each case the ZIPs throw away the directory structure to be as simple to use as possible, eg for automated tools.
% ls -l data/consolidated/energy/col/ 22479 stdMIDI-house-M.zip 17940 stdMIDI-house-Y.zip 244743 stdMIDI.zip
429s vs 503s
Both Podbean and Amazon respond in some way to 503
s. Amazon also responds to 429
s. Spotify and iTunes do not respond to anything.
So I am switching all 429
responses to 503
this evening.
I have also taken the opportunity to at least for now remove the special-case initial very harsh 503
case for very bad bots, and slightly extend one of the ex-429
cases, for some simplification.
2024-07-01: RPi3B Still Best
The minimum idle power of a RPi5 is apparently ~3.7W, which is more than I want to waste mid-winter, and my current processing power is enough.
I would like to start bringing up a replacement so that:
- I can get onto the latest supported OS (eg for security fixes) and apps.
- I have a backup in case of equipment failure (eg power supply failure as last time).
- For more storage space (eg to accommodate more podcast episodes and sonification experiments).
On the storage point, I realised that I had not even used the 512GB card bought to be prepared a year ago!
So just a new RPi3B then, from Amazon, at ~£28 roughly half the price of the previous distress purchase.
I have just used the Raspberry Pi Imager v1.8.5 to burn to the 512GB card
Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit)
ready to join the new 64-bit world!
OS customised settings for timezone Etc/UTC
, GB keyboard, no WiFi.
That only seemingly took a couple of minutes to write and verify. Nothing like the ages (hours?) to boot an old Sun 3 workstation from tape!
The real fun is still to come to parameterise my Ansible config to set up the standby host in parallel with the main one, and allow a smooth switchover.
NTP traffic slowing?
A couple of manual samples with tcpdump
suggest to me that NTP traffic is reducing. Maybe changing the DNS name was enough, for now.