Martin Bauer
831a1b50a4
Chromium: same page, same machine, idle, Firefox 24.2% of a core against Chromium's 11.4%. The build comes from archive.raspberrypi.com (a "+rpt" version) and is patched for this board's V3D GPU; Debian ships a much older chromium, so the archive matters. The whole userland here is 32-bit armhf on a 64-bit kernel, which Firefox handles worse than Chromium does. --use-gl=egl, --enable-gpu-rasterization, --ignore-gpu-blocklist and --enable-zero-copy are what keep rasterization on the GPU: Chromium's blocklist does not recognise this driver and silently falls back to software without them. pi_kiosk_browser: firefox still works, as the fallback if an update ever regresses. Debug mode also gains xdotool, scrot and --remote-debugging-port=9222 (on 127.0.0.1), because firing XTEST key events at a window lands about half the time and a benchmark you cannot verify the state of is worse than none. pi_squeezeserver gains an absent path, and mediapis.yml derives its state from mediapi_has_squeezeserver, which defaults to false for the whole group. false means "actively remove", not "skip": musicdolphin has been running a Logitech Media Server that no playbook installs and nothing talks to - every squeezelite in the fleet points at pi_squeezelite_squeezeserver (192.168.178.80, the server) - while costing ~30 MB resident and ~47 MB of swap on a 2 GB Pi that also drives the kiosk. The absent path stops it, purges the package, unregisters it from sysdweb, drops the port 80 -> 9000 redirect and deletes its database and logs. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ansible
Personal Ansible setup for provisioning and maintaining a fleet of Raspberry Pis (audio players, sensors, music mouse, etc.) plus one home server.
Layout
inventory.yml— hosts and group vars (Pis underiot, plusserver).group_vars/andhost_vars/hold vars for themediapisgroup (the four parallel audio-player Pis) and their host-specific overrides.mediapis.yml,working.yml,server.yml,newrpi-provisioning.yml,octopisetup.yml— top-level playbooks.mediapis.ymlis the canonical playbook for themediapisgroup (musicdolphin,kitchenpi,bedroompi,musicmouse); the others are narrower/ad-hoc runs kept around for specific hosts or one-off tasks.roles/— one role per piece of functionality (audio backends, sensors, bluetooth monitoring, server basics, etc.). Each has a shortREADME.md.update-packages.yml— deliberate, fleet-wide package update (see "Keeping packages up to date" below).update-packages-pinned-example.ymlis a template for pinning or bumping a single package outside that.lookup_plugins/keepass.py— custom lookup plugin that fetches secrets (device passwords, wifi passphrase) from a running KeePassXC instance via its browser-integration protocol, instead of storing them in the repo.pis/— loose config files/scripts used when provisioning Pis by hand.scripts/— standalone helper scripts (Raspbian image creation, a network logger) that aren't Ansible roles.archive/— retired setups kept for reference (not actively maintained).
Setup
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
Secrets are pulled from KeePassXC at run time via the keepass lookup
plugin — see the header of lookup_plugins/keepass.py for how to enable
Browser Integration in KeePassXC. Freshly-flashed Raspberry Pis are reached
first with the OS-default pi/raspberry credentials (see
roles/pi_standard_setup), which the role then rotates to a KeePassXC-managed
password.
Running a playbook
ansible-playbook mediapis.yml --limit <host>
ansible.cfg points Ansible at inventory.yml and roles/ by default, so
no extra flags are needed for those.
Keeping packages up to date
Regular playbook runs (mediapis.yml, server.yml, etc.) use state: present
for packages, so they only install what's missing — they never upgrade
anything as a side effect of an unrelated config change. Two separate,
deliberate mechanisms handle upgrades instead:
Security patches — automatic. The unattended_upgrades role (applied
to every host in mediapis.yml/server.yml) configures unattended-upgrades
to install security-origin updates automatically, with a scheduled reboot
window (default 03:00, see roles/unattended_upgrades/defaults/main.yml)
for patches that need one. Not scoped to full dist-upgrades.
Everything else — deliberate, ad hoc.
just update <host_or_group> # e.g. `just update kitchenpi` or `just update`
venv/bin/ansible-playbook update-packages.yml --limit <host> --check --diff # dry run first
Defaults to upgrade: safe (upgrades in place, never installs/removes
packages to resolve dependencies — see the comment header in
update-packages.yml for the tradeoff against dist). There is no cron/
schedule wired up for this yet; run it ad hoc when you want the fleet
updated, or add a crontab entry yourself (a starting point is documented in
update-packages.yml's header).
To pin a package to an exact version, or deliberately bump one named
package to latest outside this schedule, copy the pattern in
update-packages-pinned-example.yml.