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Solar Power Update – August 2025

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.

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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.

Mouses

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.

Let’s Encrypt and CloudFlare geofencing

Ah – the delights of the security dance.

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.

This FAQ from Let’s Encrypt is helpful – and I’ll probably need some process updates to make this more robust.

SLES 15 SP upgrades

It’s that time of year again.

The SUSE Linux Enterprise Server roadmap is a great planning resource.

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.

Quick and easy.

Deleting Azure Log Analytics Workspaces

Note for the future.

  1. Deletion performs a soft delete, which leaves the Log Management solution in place, which then can’t be deleted
  2. Make sure you do a hard delete, which allows the Log Management solution to be deleted.

I wish I remembered this every time.