Up to Cheltenham, and a dead Pi

Today I went out, but not caching. I went to Cheltenham, where I have a bunch of computers. The way I work them, is I have some that are customer facing, two that do backups of those, and serveral that are powered off; they're spares. I replaced one of the backup computers, and six of the spares. It went very well, the only problems were, one of the computers didn't power up (it turned out I'd flicked the power switch to off, quickly fixed) and one wasn't working when I got home, but I made a quick call to Safehosts and they had a look, and noticed that the ethernet cable had come loose, so that was also a very quick fix.

Along the way, I had a good look at the fields. All covered in snow, I don't fancy caching until this thaws a bit.

A few slight modifications to the Pi that I'm using as a terminal server. I changed it from having two desktops to having six, I changed the background to something a lot softer on the eye than a gigantic raspberry and I changed the ssh configuration so that it wouldn't take so long to connect to other servers.

GSSAPIAuthentication no

Unless I do this, it tries to use  GSSAPI Authentication and until that times out, it doesn't go on to the method that I (and I think a lot of other people) use.

I'm really happy with using a Pi this way; I have another terminal server down in the garage (also doubling as my internal DNS server). I'll change that to a Pi also.

While I was out, several parcels arrived. So I got the Pi I'd tried to use as a data server (it was too slow) and powered it up to try out the USB-to-serial thing that arrived, the one that (I hope) won't cause the Pi to hang. Immediately, there was a smell of buring, so I unplugged and looked at why. Oops. I'd set the power supply to 12 volts (for the relay box) and it was still set to 12 volts. I can now tell you that Raspberry Pis don't like 12 volts. It might be permanently dead, but I'll leave it some hours, maybe the fuse protected it. Oh well. Worst case, I've blown up a £21 computer. Ladysolly dropped her mini Ipad a few days ago, and that's going to cost ten times as much. But lesson learned - if I use a PSU at 12 volts, then I won't leave it set to 12, I'll put it back to 5 after use.