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Since I've done this four times now... and each time it's just a session of reading the docs, searching the forums, etc. until I get everything configured just so, I thought I'd document how I bring up a new MikroTik switch.

I personally love the CRS309-1G-8S+IN, and have three of them running in my homelab. They're less than $250, with 8 10 Gbps SFP+ ports, a 1 Gbps RJ45 port, and a serial console port.

But the best thing for my home use is they are fanless. Blissful silence, outside of a couple beeps the first time you plug it in.

tl;dr: No, it's not a replacement for a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. But yes, it's an exciting tiny RISC-V board that could be just the ticket for more RISC-V projects, tapping into the diverse ecosystem of existing Compute Module 4 boards.

This tiny computer is the Mars CM. It's the exact same size and shape as the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. It should be a drop-in replacement. And on its box it says it supports 4K, Bluetooth and WiFi, and has gigabit Ethernet. It's also supposed to have PCI Express!

This is the fastest Arm desktop in the world, yes, even faster than the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. And today, I made it even faster.

I upgraded everything: Faster RAM, 128 core CPU, 40 series GPU, I did it all, and we'll see how much we can obliterate the M2 Mac Pro.

128 cores—that's five times more cores, I'm also going to upgrade this thing from 96 all the way to 384 gigabytes of RAM. The Mac Pro? Sorry, it only goes up to 192.

And we're just in time for the new Cinebench 2024 benchmark, which—yes—this machine dominates.

Ansible Galaxy was recently updated to the 'Next Generation' (Galaxy-NG) codebase.

There are some growing pains, as a lot of Galaxy NG was built up around Collections, and Ansible role support was written into the codebase over the past year or so, after it became obvious Galaxy roles would not be deprecated.

Unfortunately, one of the major issues right now—which I'm seeing pop up in many places—is an error that occurs upon installation of Galaxy roles for any playbook (e.g. when you run ansible-galaxy install to download a role), for any role that has had a new version released in the past few weeks.

You wind up with an error like:

In my video about the brand new Raspberry Pi 5, I mentioned the new external PCIe port makes it possible to boot the standard Pi 5 model B directly off NVMe storage—an option which is much faster and more reliable than standard microSD storage (even with industrial-rated cards!).

Enabling NVMe boot is pretty easy, you add a line to /boot/firmware/config.txt, modify the BOOT_ORDER in the bootloader configuration, and reboot!

Because I love doing things quite backwards, I found myself in a predicament: I had only a wired direct connection between my laptop and the Raspberry Pi where I was running LibreELEC. Using mDNS I could connect to it directly connected at LibreELEC.local, and that's great...

But I wanted to join it to a WiFi network, and I only had a not-great 6-button remote control to plug into the Pi, so entering in long passwords via the UI (if that's even possible without a keyboard?) was not something I wanted to attempt.

Since I could ssh [email protected], I figured I'd connect to the available WiFi network, so it would be more convenient to update the device and put more content on it. Not to mention it expands Kodi's capabilities if you give it an Internet connection!

Enter ConnMan

LibreELEC uses ConnMan to manage network interfaces, and setting WiFi is a little strange, but doable:

While logged into the LibreELEC machine, enter connmanctl to get into the ConnMan shell.

Then do the following: