Oh, brother, has this been a mess. I’ve certainly relearned a great deal about Linux partitions and boot sectors and a bunch of other stuff that I used to know cold, but this process has beaten me.
This morning, after about a week of doing battle with this process, and several others, I’ve thrown in the towel and I am rebuilding from scratch.
I was expecting this to cause me a great deal of issues just getting the damned thing to boot, but it isn’t really all that hard. For whatever reason, I can get the desktop to load on the initial boot, but once the software updates and I reboot, no desktop. I’ve verified that the system is up, just not providing graphics or detecting the HDMI cable. This was making me mad a couple of days ago, but, you know what? I am running this thing headless, anyway. I have spent the last year or two with this Pi and every config change was made via ssh. Once I stopped fighting, and remembered to set set the Raspi-config to boot to CLI, suddenly I could get the HDMI working. Very odd, not worrying about it, removed HDMI cable and I am sshed in and getting ready to start rebuilding from scratch. Let me tell you, I am glad that I have kept this blog running!
I think I am going to skip SoftEther VPN this time and see if OpenVPN works in my new place of employment. Not that I have a ton of time these days to screw around like I did at the last place! Holy moly, this is what working for a living is like! I was very spoiled at the last place; learning Linux, researching Irish history, doing days upon days of genealogy, learning Python, etc, etc. Those days are behind me now for sure! I want to revisit the logging server, too. What I had running was good, but not great. I really want to try and not have to send my data out to a cloud service just to get access to my log data, so maybe the solution that I had in place was the best one available, even though I think it is abandoned.
For now, back to basics: static IP addresses, NTP server, Pi-Hole, syslogd, etc. Off to it!
Oh. Wait. I have to do yard work.