Month: November 2015

Pi Net Upgraded

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I have been challaged with figuring out an easy way to upgrade the Bittorrent Sync software I use to replicate my files on my Raspberry Pi’s.  The upgrade process on my mac is super easy.  The upgrade process on Raspbian should be easy however the person who has been maintaining the easy to upgrade package hasn’t updated his package in 9 months.

The internet is a small world.  Every single how to i find on the internet about installing Bittorrent Sync on a Pi (I found at least a half a dozen) point to this one repo.  I found instructions on how to setup everything manually however it was not a simple process.  Right as I was reviewing the steps to do the manual install I stumbled accross someone who forked the original package and is maintaining the latest update of the sync software.

After testing the install process on a clean Pi, I ran an upgrade on one of the two Pi’s I currently have at home.  The upgrade worked great.  I just ran the upgrade on the other local Pi and then on the remote units with no major issues.  This new repo says they are in sync with Bittorrent Sync’s release schedule by about 24 hours.  Hopefully I will be able to stay up to date from now on.

I am hoping my upgrade (from 2.0.94 to 2.2.7) solves some minor bugs I have been experiencing with one location.

This was the first major upgrade to all my nodes on my private cloud.  I was a bit cautious however in the end the system didn’t get corrupted and functioned as it should.

Next up I am thinking about another remote node location.

Pi Net Back to Full Power

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After a few weeks of running in a degraded state I have all my Sync nodes back online.  Some very basic maintenance at my parents for thanksgiving got me working with my problem node.  I ended up swapping out the Pi at my parents place for a Mac Mini that I stopped using after I got my latest Apple TV.  That mini had a replica copy on a larger hard drive so the swap out was less about any issues with the Pi vs I took the opportunity to upgrade while i was there.

I need to call my sync network something other than Pi Net since right now the majority of the nodes are not Raspberry Pi’s.

Happy This Morning Equals

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Happy this morning equals listening to Beethoven’s ninth Symphony while listening to the girls run around and play.
Let’s face it the armor exhibit at the Met and liking classical music is some of the few bits of culture that they will get from me.

This moment was brought to me by Café Americano.

My New Apple TV

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Just in time for me to give up on my Mac Mini running Kodi the new Apple TV arrived.  It doesn’t solve all my media center problems however it is a step in the right direction since it now runs Plex.  The setup is much more reliable than what I was experiencing with my Kodi build.

The main issue i have with the Apple TV is i cannot currently run HDHomerun to watch live TV streaming from my cable card HDHomerun device.  My current work around is using my old Google TV.  Thankfully that device has an app that runs the live tv streaming.  It isn’t the greatest but it is reliable.  I plug the Google TV into the Apple TV and it can run as an overlay on the Apple TV.  The benifit of that is I don’t need to change the TV inputs to watch live TV.  that is a big win since switching TV inputs with the Logitech Harmony has been less than reliable recently.

I am hoping an app comes out on the Apple TV that solves the limitation however until then I at least have a reliable if not clunky (too many remotes ) solution.