2020-Nov-21 wasn’t so much an outage as a transition.
I finally threw in the towel on Window 10 Home Edition and rebuilt my transmitter on top of the Manjaro distribution of Arch Linux.
Source: this Facebook Post
The following is Archival Content
Manjaro !
The transmitter had been crashing a lot. I was pretty sure it was due to the super-laggy HDD hard drive. I purchased an SSD and created a bootable image of my old disk …
But I could never get Windows to boot back up. I tried at least 5 different techniques to restore the image, but it was all to no avail.
Because of course, in the process of juggling the disks, I ended up wiping my original image. Which was truly a blessing. I had fully intended to continue using Windows, because a rebuild just wasn’t “necessary”.
Look.
I’m a software dev spending serious time in both macOS and Linux kernels,
so I have no idea why I fought so much inertia in switching the transmitter over to *nix.
It’s so much easier to manage & automate.
Setup is all bash scripts & properly-located .conf files, which I can maintain in Git.
The virtualization task itself just requires an install of VirtualBox.
I don’t even use the windowed OS –
my interactions are all ssh & command-line.
The first couple weeks were a bit bumpy, as this 2020-Dec-12 admits. But overall, the station has been delightfully stable since then. And there’s finally some server-side monitoring of the Windows XP VM, so I can get advance notice of sluggishness or out-of-memory issues and can address them proactively. With Windows 10, it was always reactionary.
Since that early rough patch, the VM only need a gentle reboot about once every three weeks.