Cloning RaspberryPi SD Cards

This is the best clone tool I’ve found, and used.
https://github.com/billw2/rpi-clone
For what I want I just use the command: $ rpi-clone sda
This clones the current bootable SD Card to the SD Card in the USB port.

nginx – basics

This is a quick aid based on the Raspberry Pi documentation.

Some basic commands are:

sudo nginx -s reload
sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
systemctl status nginx.service

 

Cannot synchronise MLAT with Piaware?

Possibly an issue with Pi firmware of 4.9.x, find out your version by using this command

uname -a

If so then issue these commands, the first installs the firmware updater the second the 4.4.50 version of the firmware.

sudo apt-get install rpi-update
sudo rpi-update 52241088c1da59a359110d39c1875cda56496764

If you can’t install the firmware because you have a “custom” kernel then you’ll have to get the latest version of Raspbian and install that, then run the above two commands.

Reducing wear on your sd-card

One way to increase the lifespan, and presumably, reliability of the sd-card, currently being hammered, in your Pi is to put some of the temporary files into memory.

Add the following to your /etc/fstab

tmpfs /var/log tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=50M 0 0

If the size isn’t specified then half of the machine’s memory is used.
nodev and nosuid are security options, the suggestion is that these only need setting for public facing machines.

 

8-Jan-2018: If you’re using the lighttpd web server then be aware that it stores files in /var/log, and it doesn’t like them being removed. This will cause the server to fail to start.

Install Synaptic package manager on the Raspberry Pi

To install a GUI package manager use:
sudo apt-get install synaptic