The new v6 and v7 family Azure hardware is now broadly available, with plenty of capacity in the various regions.
The biggest changes are to network and storage drivers, moving to use the Microsoft MANA interface for network fabric, and a switch from SCSI to NVMe for disk.
Unlike previous SKU updates, e.g. v3 to v5, this family update requires some planning, especially on the Linux side.
There is a great PowerShell script to assist with the switch, which automates much of the roll forward, and provides a roll back as well.
In testing I found that two additional checks made this work flawlessly:
Ensure the latest Azure VM tools are are installed (azure-vm-utils)
Ensure the nvme drivers are installed (modprobe, dracut.conf)
Usual disclaimers before doing this – ensure you have a backup of your Linux VM before this work, you could be left with a somewhat broken VM. The rollback script works well.
I am really pleased with the solar panel/battery installation.
It’s not quite perfect – but we are banking enough power to only get billed during the dark, dark months.
One body of work over the coming months is to analyse a few years worth of data, and see if additional battery capacity would help this at all, and most critically whether it would give any return on investment.
During the summer we are generating during the day, filling the batteries, selling to the grid for credits, and then running off battery over night.
A decade ago I bought three Microsoft Surface Precision mice. I love the tactile feeling, and wired or bluetooth operation.
The last of these died over the weekend. A sad day. These mice are no longer made, used versions sell for hundreds on Amazon and eBay. My replacement was a Logitech MX Master 3S – which is performing well.
This website, and others I maintain, use CloudFlare as the free front-end to safeguard against brute force and DDOS attacks. For several of these sites the geo-fencing is set to US only.
Last time round the certs failed to renew. Some troubleshooting, and the secondary challenge from the Let’s Encrypt ACME client was getting firewall denied at the Cloudflare side.
There is no allow-list of IPs, nor a single ASN to allow.
Upgrading from SLES 15 SP5 – and I got the choices of SP6 and SP7, the latter may be late public beta, release candidate or general availability. (Usually non-GA releases are flagged as such, so I suspect that the upstream repos have recently rolled over to GA. I’ll update over the coming week).
The usual zypper migration, resolve some dependency issues (deprecated packages, standalone items to make SLES 15 SP5 useful), accept the EULA, and ten minutes of updates and a reboot later.
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