Stratum 1 microserver HOWTO

[MIKE MAJOR]

 Hello everyone. I see now that my email client does not do the indented-previous-mail format so well. I'll have to work on that. 

    On Wednesday, August 1, 2018 3:26 PM, Paul Theodoropoulos via devel <devel at ntpsec.org> wrote:
>Certainly. I'm not married to any of this - the reality is that the 
>howto as it is right now works just fine. There are a small handful of 
>confusing parts which are mostly due to formatting and ordering, which I 
>continue to poke at (it's a very long document, so i have to focus in 
>chunks). There are certainly 'cost'/benefit arguments at every juncture 
>of this.
I'd like to say a little about my "freshman" experience so far. The thing that stood out to me most so far about the HOWTO is the formatting. The beginning clearly prepares the reader for 8 sections. However, later the section boundaries are nowhere to be found. There's nothing to say when you complete one section and begin another. Luckily that is easily remedied. It would provide me an opportunity to learn asciidoc (since I've never run across that before). I think the (clickable) TOC is a help as well. 

I'm trying not to read too far ahead in the HOWTO document. I made some assumptions early on about the flow and intent of the document and forged ahead. I did a bunch of work and then returned to it. That is when I realized that I installed the LXDE Respbian desktop without dcfldd and did the "smoke testing" but in a different way. Now I will backtrack and follow the document as you would like it verified. I'll follow it more closely and make no assumptions. 

As an aside, I personally like the NOOBS installer from respberrypi.org. I got the OS image installed and the pi booted by unzipping an archive, copying files to the SD and powering up. That's the definition of easy on any host platform. After I realized that you wanted the CLI disto only, it even allowed performing a net install which replaced the GUI. Very nice.

I'm all for teaching people why certain actions/decisions are taken. Perhaps the essence of the discussion in the previous mails should be replicated somewhat in the HOWTO. In the computer world, there are usually many ways to "skin the cat." We could write this into the HOWTO, explaining that there are many methods which lead to a booting pi. However, here is the method we provide. While it is not the only method to achieve the goal of a booting CLI pi, it has been tested and it works. dcfldd/ddimage are the most low level. You are probably right that the explanation will require little maintenance in the future as dd usage hasn't changed much over the years.

I also see that my suggestion of Arch or Fedora is premature. I've read as far as the clockmaker script. As I understand it, that supports debian only as apt-get is the only package manager employed. That sounds like an item for the todo list: make clockmaker Redhat-aware like buildprep. Then they could both be made Arch/pacman aware.

Finally, as I am the new guy I read the previous mails in the thread attentively. They made me muse about the project and ask myself questions. I'll not lengthen this mail any more by asking them here. I think a new thread might be warranted. 

Thank you for the opportunity to learn and to help out. I am quite looking forward to it. I believe I have found the end of the firehose and have begun to drink. :)

Mike Major


   
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