Lubuntu ⁽²⁾

After a life in IT you'd think I would be better at this stuff. Two things caught me out this week, both around the web server that runs this blog among other things. The first knocked it offline and I was unaware. The server is a dimimutive Lenovo ThinkCentre M92p and has 4 USB ports but none work which was annoying as I wanted to upgrade Lubuntu but really wanted a decent backup to an external device first. I had another of these systems with working USB ports so I swapped the hard disk between the two - the specs are essentially the same. All went well, apparently. I attached a USB SDD to use as a backup for the pending operating system upgrade. Then I noticed no incoming email plus I tried to access the blog from an external IP and it failed. Odd. No issues with accessing from the house LAN. Then I remembered having an issue with the PlusNet router but could not remember what so I logged into that to see if my memory would return. And it did. The PlusNet router helpfully follows MAC addresses rather than IP addresses so when I swapped the HDD…

Background My Windows PC has a 4th generation i7 chip and will not take Windows 11. I am not about to run an unpatched Windows of any version nor am I prepared to upgrade a perfectly usable PC just so I can use W11 so I will need to dump Windows before the end of life date in October 2025. I counted 40 programs that I use, two of which are games so do not really count. Of the 38, only a few were hardcore Windows packages where there was no existing equivalent or anything similar enough. Some of the main ones had paid-for licenses, for example VARA and SatPC32 - somehow those need to work on Linux! I decided I would keep the two PCs even after one no longer ran Windows. It may seem odd to have two identical Linux systems but I find it convenient to have one PC for each of my HF rigs - even though wsjt-x, for example has profiles and can support several rigs that may not be the case with each bit of software that I use, and there may be items specific to each rig. The PCs are almost identical, both…