How to safely power down a headless Pi?

SSH is only as bulletproof as the underlying operating system

I cant believe you have never had a headless server that for whatever reason has run out of RAM, is in full swap, and if you get a login prompt in under an hour that's good going.

We had a system where we could dial in on a modem and power cycle one of

OP here. What I meant when I said "...I can't log in via ssh." is a situation where the software has crashed or something like that. I know quite well how to configure a Pi to let me log in using ssh.

I use 'man -k', exactly the same, very useful.

Exactly, that leaves serial port as probably the only way to see what's what, and even that wont work if getty cant spawn a login shell due to lack of free memory

That really should NOT be happening. First stop is log files to see what errors precede the hard reboot

-- “it should be clear by now to everyone that activist environmentalism (or environmental activism) is becoming a general ideology about humans, about their freedom, about the relationship between the individual and the state, and about the manipulation of people under the guise of a 'noble' idea. It is not an honest pursuit of 'sustainable development,' a matter of elementary environmental protection, or a search for rational mechanisms designed to achieve a healthy environment. Yet things do occur that make you shake your head and remind yourself that you live neither in Joseph Stalin’s Communist era, nor in the Orwellian utopia of 1984.”

Vaclav Klaus

I find it amazing how often that sort of thing happens. People skip read posts and only respond to parts. They've obviously got time because often the posts are llloooonnnngggg!

did you actually eread the OP? Stop DIGGING!

Interesting idea.

The Worm *works* ... but I really do NOT like it. Changes TOO many things to NO obvious purpose. I fear Deb has been compromised by Canonical thinking ....... if this continues I may have to go to Arch or even Slack or - horrors - BSDs.

Linux should not be "Popular" s*it ... it should be staid and solid and consistent.

Got a Pi5 coming ... it's gonna be for "multi- media" (streaming) stuff. I've got Worm/PI ready for it ... but might NOT stick with it. VERY disappointed in Deb now.

Hello druck!

Wednesday January 03 2024 21:17, you wrote to All:

Any chance you can discontinue this message format as for myself as one I cannot read it and it does not comply with the standards for any messaging that I have found including fido and Usenet.

Vincent

Given the warnings that a Bullseye to Bookworm upgrade wasn't viable, I did a fresh install of Bookworm on my new Pi 5, and was less than impressed. It completely ignored my attempts to replace Pixel with my preferred Mate desktop, and I was horrified to find rsyslog wasn't active and only journald s**te.

So I abandoned that, and went back to it's predecessor Pi 4B, which was running Bullseye 64 bit (hand upgraded from 32 bit, and prior to that in place upgraded all the way from the very fist OS running an the original

---druck

Vincent,

That looks like nothing I've ever seen. My own (ancient!) OE6 shows the raw message headers to be this :

- - - - - - - ... Message-ID: <un4isp$3b8gn$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me ... Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 ...

- - - - - - - (legal, as specified in the RFC for newsgroup messages)

That block is just the base-64 encodeded (as mentioned in the headers) text. It looks like your message reader cut a few corners and doesn't understand (didn't implement?) this, quite legal, method of encoding a message.

IOW, it looks to be a "you", and not a "druck" problem ...

Regards, Rudy Wieser

The stuff with @ signs and SEEN-BY is something local to you, it’s not in the original.

The base64 encoding is described in

The gateway software you’re using is literally from the last millenium (November 2000 release date); time for an update, perhaps.

Gosh I didn't see that it was base 64 encoded!

No reason for that.

Thunderbird doesnt normally encode usenet that way...

Perhaps it's to make the UTF-8 7 bit clean.

All of that comes from whatever usenet/fidonet gateway you're using

The base64 coding does come from druck's Thunderbird, but it's probably not his fault, there's a longer chain of "blame" ...

The message from snipped-for-privacy@ztq4.net uses 8bit encoding and seems to have needlessly changed spaces into sequences of 0xC3 0x82 0x20 possibly triggered by Chris Elvidge's message also using 8bit coding and including non US ASCII characters (e.g. a British pound sign £)

I think it needs Chris Elvidge and/or 56g.1183 to use 7-bit encoding for their UTF-8 messages

The mail.strictly_mime=true setting also has an influence

But it seems Thunderbird isn't as well behaved as I thought, it is easily tempted into using base64 encoding instead of 7bit encoding with quoted-printable characters :-(

Has anyone got any better settings?

According to those what know better than I Usenet and Mime base 64 are now a standard.

So if you cant read it, update your user agent...

What's "hand upgraded"? I have this Pi that I kinda would like to keep running for a while yet but it has Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on it. Canonical extended the support for 20.04 LTS until 2030 but not for the armhf architecture which I have. I've considered cross grading it to arm64 but I'm not sure it's worth the trouble or if that would even work. And this is a CM3+ so there's no SD card, only soldered eMMC for storage.

A good question is why you would want to upgrade at all. If you have used it for a specific task and it is still performing that task well, what is the problem?