Nothing of Any Quincyquonce

Todays fun – installing old (2005 era!) software on a modern (2019) distro.

I’ve been playing LAN shooter games with the boy for a while; it’s old school EA Battlefield 2 from mid 2005. It’s ancient. Today we looked at setting up a dedicated LAN server for this one.

openSUSE Leap 15.1 continues to be solid on a wide variety of hardware. I rescued an old laptop and it’s installed and running as a server (runlevel 3 – no GUI). Only additional module needed for the EA dedicated server was libncurses5 – easily installed using zypper. (As an aside – it’s a pleasure seeing this working so well after the delights of ZMD/ZLM back in the day..)

Hunting down the original EA bits for the server is a pain – eventually managed to find a pristine (and checksummed!) copy on a fan server.

Zypper lost the repos for SLES 12 on Azure again. There is a good KB from SUSE on this. https://www.suse.com/support/kb/doc/?id=7022311

After a couple of goes at this – I finally found time to get this working.

I found that good old scripting worked beautifully – kudos to Neil Pang for acme.sh – it’s a work of art.

Installation instructions are easy; there’s a great walkthrough for Apache2.

A little testing with CloudFlare (turning off their re-write and dynamic SSL support) – and it’s working a treat.

Finally got this all working across multiple servers, websites and vhosts.

Again the SLES team made this really easy – using zypper and the online update repositories. Less than 15 minutes per server – and a single reboot.

Documentation is at https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles-12/book_sle_deployment/data/sec_update_migr_zypper_onlinemigr.html

Accept the recommended upgrade – and read and accept the EULA – and you’re away. For me 240MB download, 156 packages, 10 minutes of install, one reboot.

zypper migration

Available migrations:

    1 | SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP4 x86_64

Another placeholder to keep notes and hints on Family Tree research.

There was a hint that a distant relative had been transported – good contemporary documentation for that fact; but nothing conclusive linking the father to children.

Eventually the route to solve this seems to have been through the wife/mother of children. Unfortunately the data isn’t very clean nor consistent.

• Transcription errors (and inconsistencies between FindMyPast and Ancestry) on names and birth locations
• Were they really married? No records of banns, church marriage or any civil records.
• Name changes as the enumerator takes names; and as general literacy improves during the 19th Century
• Inconsistent dates of birth – as folk want to seem older/younger/closer in age to their spouse

In preparation for hitting the trail – we decided to taste test several dehydrated and freeze dried offerings.

The boy isn’t too keen on oatmeal – and all of the lightweight hiking blogs talk about making your own oatmeal/granola mixes. Time for some other ideas.

I went off to REI and picked up a few ideas. We’ve been fans of the Mountain House camping meals for a while – they are quite salty though. More recently we tried a few of the Good-To-Go meals – which were pretty good.

This was also a great time to check out the camping stoves, teach the boy how to light them – and get the water boiling.

Here are the details. All prices are correct at the time of purchase.

Good-to-Go Oatmeal

https://www.rei.com/product/121301/good-to-go-oatmeal

https://goodto-go.com/products/oatmeal

$6.50

This was always going to be hit or miss. The reviews on REI are like Marmite – love it or hate it. Let’s see.

We followed the instructions to the letter. What resulted was a really strange gloop. The smell was kind-of-spicy, kind-of-porridge. The consistency was nutty. The taste was, in our opinion, quite vile. The vegetarian of the house however demolished a bowl after returning from a trail run.

Verdict:

3/10 for taste

2/10 for cost

We won’t be taking this on the trail. A real disappointment.

Backpacker’s Pantry Huevos Rancheros

https://www.rei.com/product/618926/backpackers-pantry-huevos-rancheros-egg-scramble-mix-2-servings

https://www.backpackerspantry.com/freeze-dried-food/breakfast/huevos-rancheros

$7.50

Ok – I did what quite a few others have done – and picked this up without reading the details. This is dried eggs; not freeze dried and dehydrated cooked eggs. It makes up about 300ml of egg/beans/cheese mix – that then needs cooking up in a pan. Not really backpacking food at all. That being said – it was good.

Following the instructions – this turned out really well. Could have done with a few minutes more to rehydrate the black beans – some were still a little crunchy. With some hot sauce this could be a real hit for car camping.

Verdict:

8/10 for taste

6/10 for cost

Not for the trail – but great for car camping.

Mountain House Scrambled Eggs with Bacon

https://www.rei.com/product/510120/mountain-house-scrambled-eggs-with-bacon-single-serving

https://www.mountainhouse.com/M/product/scrambled-eggs-bacon.html

$8.00

Reading the reviews and the instructions – there’s a “remove excess water” comment. Urg. Not what we want to be doing in bear country. Again – we followed instructions to the letter.

Very wet. Lots of excess water. Salty bacon too. Strange egg texture. As noted in the REI reviews – it’s unlike scrambled eggs and bacon. We would certainly try this with a tortilla and hot sauce. Concerned about the extra water though.

Verdict:

7/10 for taste

6/10 for cost

Mountain House Breakfast Skillet

https://www.rei.com/product/800872/mountain-house-breakfast-skillet-2-servings

https://www.mountainhouse.com/M/product/breakfast-skillet.html

$10.00

Pricier than the rest – but two huge servings. Hash browns, egg, sausage, pepper and onions.

This took a good while to rehydrate – but in the end was worth the wait. It looks a lot like beige gloop – but certainly textures and tastes were good. We think this would be great in a tortilla – and adding some hot sauce really lifted this one.

Verdict:

8/10 for taste

7/10 for cost

This was the best of the four.

I’ve been running a set of ASUS wifi routers for a few years – RT-AC66U and RT-AC68U – and using the custom firmware via AsusWRTMerlin https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/about

The RT-AC66U has moved out of support – so no new firmware or security updates. The dilemma is what to do next?

Run old RT-AC66U units until they fail – i.e. do nothing.

Update old RT-AC66U units to RT-AC68Us and have a consistent set of routers – i.e. standardise on an older hardware platform.

Update all ASUS routers to something newer and current.

I’m tending toward the former right now – running IPsec, firewall and all of the other pieces seems to be pretty ok for now. In terms of attack surface and ease of access there are softer networks just next door. Not the best answer in my security head – but I’ll keep reviewing prices and hardware.

During early 2019 I started researching my family tree.

This post is a series of ongoing notes and updates on various tools, websites and resources I have found useful.

Subscription sites

https://findmypast.co.uk

https://ancestry.co.uk

(UK subscriptions) Useful to cross reference the two different transcriptions for the same events. Typos and interpretations are different. Also Ancestry has a different range of records to Find My Past.

1939 Register is incredibly useful for tracking the locations of 20th Century people – and has mostly accurate dates of birth. Also great for tracking forward looking marriages (changes in unmarried name) and even ending location post marriage in some cases based on NHS location codes.

England Registration Districts mapping (1850 is not 2019!)

https://www.familysearch.org/mapp/

Notes: To understand the historical boundaries between e.g. Essex, Middlesex and the overlay of Registration Districts.

A quick morning updating the Minecraft server that’s there for private play for the boy.

Ubuntu updates on Azure are actually painless. Minecraft jar update took a few moments.

Happy, patched and back to letting the boy play with his friends.

There are some cool Minecraft 1.13 world seeds here btw https://mine.guide/tutorials/best-seeds-for-minecraft-1-13/