So I once saw a 'cluster hat' and immediately wanted to have one, so I could make a small cluster with raspberry pi zeros.

So I finally got one. And in waiting a bit, some things with it changed: such as the ability to boot over nfs - no need for any sd (tf) cards.

This is good because tf cards are expensive and the ones I get are inevitably slow. I have used usb things for various bits, but that tends to also be slow - whereas network tends to be something I can control more readily. (Though this is ip over usb, so... anyway.)

So in getting that I also learned of the pi usb stem, zerostem.io , and it's cost. Which was basically "less than lunch." So I ordered one, which came with one of the zeros. While I had 4 zeros before, they... well they had been affixed with gpio headers, and the cluster hat is sort of the same size as the gpio header connectors... which means there might be some electrical interference if not a direct short. And we can't have that. So I got new zeros without connectors. (And somehow ended up with a zero 1.2, which has no camera attachment...)

Anyway point is: today I did the entire setup from start to finish, manually, without using the clusterhat prepared software.

• booting the intial program/kernel using 'rpiboot'
• debugging via serial
• setting up nfs for sending the root filesystem
• updating the system without using dhcp (proxy)

I will write up more detailed stuff later somewhere, as I actually just broke it - I updated it, and something went awry - I shall see what that is tommorrow. (Likely something with the kernel, as it now can't find the usb0 network device. That is sort of needed, it's what provides the root filesystem over nfs (: )

Anyway this is the last entry for a rather poor performance for 2017. 2018 is to be better, and I am to do things regularly, and if I don't, do be giving me shit. Not the sort of shit that comes from ignoring that I have done things and saying I haven't, but reminding me that I enjoy doing things and do not enjoy not doing things, so why don't I just stop not doing things and do things.

So on to 2018.