How to safely power down a headless Pi?

These are about converting VPS systems from Ubuntu to Debian, but the process ought to be the same except for any special driver requirements for the RPis:

I don't know if anyone has a working cross-grade for Raspbian then, so I created a new partition with a clean 64 bit Bullseye on it, installed all the same optional packages as the 32 bit partition, then copied over all /home, /opt, bits of /var and lastly looked at /etc. That was the trickiest bit, machine-id and ssh/ssh_host* were copied across to preserve the identity, but all the other files had to be diffed and changes integrated so as to keep the legit configuration and to shed some of the cruft from multiple previous OS releases.

---druck

I have done crossgrades with Debian (x86->amd64) and while it worked[1], I can’t really recommend it unless you are very confident indeed. I’d expect a similar situation with Raspbian/RPi OS.

$ ls -l /etc/hostname -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6 Mar 24 1995 /etc/hostname $ cat /etc/debian_version 12.4 $ uname -r 6.1.0-16-amd64

Makes me wonder how practical it would be to automate this: a tool which captured the configuration of one host (list of packages, configuration that’s been customized relative to installed versions, extra state in /var, etc) and modified a second host to match. I suspect doing it properly would be more work than is worthwhile (architecture transitions just don’t happen very often) but that doesn’t always stop people l-)

None of Chris’s message is quoted in David’s message, so I don’t see how that can be relevant.

I don’t see the C3... sequence you mention in 56g’s message:

# grep From: 34062 From: "56g.1183" snipped-for-privacy@ztq4.net # hd 34062|grep c3 #

However David’s message does use U+00A0 (i.e. NO-BREAK SPACE, C2 A0 in UTF-8), as part of the quoting of 56g’s message:

# tail +27 34073|base64 -id|hd|head

I think that’s a quoting decision made by Thunderbird, perhaps triggered by an internal trip through an HTML representation where the redundant multiple spaces at the start of 56g’s lines need to be converted to something else to avoid whitespace collapsing.

Thunderbird’s decision to use base64 is certainly not what I’d do (NNTP is 8-bit clean so Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit would be perfectly adequate) but it is in-spec and has been for many years.

Wow, I've actually followed exactly that gist on my Oracle freebie VPS. It's a good guide but not suitable for the old Pi. I'm not sure of the other one. Anyways, I'm not looking to install Debian on this.

I did see a blog post here

What I'm planning is either retire or replace the thing, I actually have a cheap refurb mini-PC to take its place running Debian currently or cross grade to amd64 so I would need no changes and have support until

As it happens, during the Xmas break I got around to playing with my RTL-SDR software radio and getting some weather data from my outdoor wireless temperature/humidity sensor. Works fine but the rtl_433 package on Ubuntu 20.04 is too old, I'd need a newer rtl_433 to easily support the sensor I have. One point in favor of upgrading Ubuntu.

No everything useful was copied over, but I spent some time looking at /etc to weed out config for packages which are no longer installed. For the stuff that is still installed the config files have often gained new options over time, and it's useful to add these in to my copies, so they can be altered in future.

---druck