Hello.

Oh man, the air is so. clear. I can feel the difference in my lungs! I’ve been back up to 21-22 miles a week since everything started. The roads and trails are empty! I started a new remote job back in November, so I’ve been WFH already. I’ve been taking advantage of this opportunity. Basically I shut down the laptop, then put on running shoes for an hour or an hour and a half!

Sure, the races are all cancelled because Americans are a nervous, paranoid group of hypochondriacs. However, I’m going to keep up the mileage and be in good shape to target a marathon for later this year or next year!

TL;DR – If you want to set up a Raspberry Pi and a hard drive to act as a network Time Machine server, use Samba and ext4. If you find a post on some site that tells you to install netatalk and hfsprogs, flip off your monitor, close the tab, and Google again.

A long, long time ago, I looked into setting up a Raspberry Pi to handle network backups for all the Macs at home. There were many posts on how to set up a Pi with an USB-connected external hard drive to act as a now discontinued Airport Time Machine Capsule.

This was great and a great fit for several reasons:

• All the machines that are relevant at home are Macs. Time Machine backups are easy to set up on the Mac side.
• Apple discontinued the Time Machine Capsule because they want you to backup and store things in the cloud. This is stupid. Do. Not. Trust. The. Cloud. You have been warned.
• Time Machine Capsule was a great idea in an overpriced (typical) package anyway. A Pi solution would be cheap and scale way better than TMC ever did.
• A Time Machine Capsule would let me back up all my Macs to it on the network with little fuss on the Mac side
• This is not my primary backup method. My primary backup method is copying my HDs every quarter or so onto a HD and putting that HD in a safe deposit box. This primary method is for the “oh shit I’ve lost everything but at least I have my files” scenario. This backup method is just for occasionally recovering a deleted file that I needed.

In google searches, there’s a slew of blogs and content farms that walk you through how to set this up. They all say the same thing, because, well, they just copy the same crap from each other. After some trial and error, turns out, the way these sites tell you do to it is absolute garbage. They’re just there to generate clicks for the site, and no one actually tested to see if they work.

Using a Raspberry Pi for Time Machine on Paul Mucur’s site is the only way to set up a reliable Pi-powered Time Machine server.. Do not trust any other site.

Do not trust howtogeek, lifehacker, etc. Do not trust any other blog site that shows you how to do this. Paul Mucur’s way is the only way to do it if you actually want a functioning Time Machine backup solution.

Every other site tells you to use Apple File Protocol via the unix package, netatalk, to communicate with the machine. They tell you also to format the drive with HFS+ and access it via the hfsprogs package. Neither technology works reliably. It’d be easy to blame the software, but it’s more likely AFP and HFS+ are terrible and have always been terrible.

I remember messing with netatalk in the late 90’s trying to get some Macs to talk to some unix shares. Fucking thing never worked, and apparently is only marginally ok today. However, it still isn’t reliable to handle Time Machine backups.

HFS+’s woes and shortcomings have been well critiqued.

At first I had an issue where the first Time Machine backup would work, taking like 24 hours. This is expected. Incremental backups would work fine for maybe three or four times. Then, the backup file on the drive would get corrupted. Time Machine would complain, and I’d have to start all over, running that initial 24 hour+ backup again. This was insane. I didn’t think it was necessarily the drive, because I could still connect and write to it ok. I could also transfer huge files, big and small, via other methods like FTP and SCP. My hunch was the networking was crap.

I found that Time Machine also supported Samba, not just AFP. I got rid of netatalk and switched to Samba. The incremental backup corruptions disappeared. Great! I thought. I could go into Time Machine and see all my backups. I thought my old nemesis netatalk was to blame. Turns out, it was only partial.

After a power outage, I found the whole damn USB drive was corrupted. I could go into the Pi and mount the shares just fine, but they were always mounted as read only. No amount of fscking could fix it. I thought it was the cheap Amazon Basics USB hard drive enclosure, so I got a better rated one. No difference. I always had to format the drive and do the huge initial backup again. I went through three power failures like this. I was about to give up on the whole idea, but on a whim, I tried formatting the drive as ext4. Macs can’t read/write ext4, but Samba handled that detail for the Macs. There was no reason that couldn’t work.

I’ve now suffered through three additional power outages, and I’m able to recover flawlessly. I have to manually re-mount the shares on the Pi, but they mount as RW. This is just an automation task that I haven’t implemented yet. The clients then can reconnect, and the backup file is not corrupted. I’m able to backup from High Sierra and Catalina. Time Machine just picks up where it left off on all machines.

My hardware setup is a Raspberry Pi 4, Seagate 6TB NAS HD in a Inatek enclosure connected via USB 3. The Pi 4 is connected via Cat 6 cable. Due to the USB and ethernet architecture limitations of other Pi’s, don’t do this on anything but a Pi 4.

I was going to document the steps, but found Paul Mucur already did it. The only thing I deviated from was not installing Avahi initially. This then requires me to manually reconnect from the Macs, after re-mounting should a power outage occur. I will try in install Avahi again in the future. The rest of the instructions on that site on Samba and ext4 are solid and look like they should work.

I haven’t given any races my money yet. Paying attention to the WuFlu situation. I’ve basically spent my days reading scientific papers about it. It’s gonna come here. Stockpiled food, pet food, coffee, and TP just in case. This should be fun!

Things we have learned:

• Running on keto is possible. A performance hit is there, but it’s not that terrible the better fat-adapted I am.
• I wasn’t (at Iron Horse) as fat adapted as I thought I was. Performing on keto is a whole different ballgame from just being on keto.
• Whether I can get back to my pre-keto pace, jury is out. No doubt the butt muscle situation this year prevented this from being a really good experiment. Let’s try it again next year because ultimately this is what I’m documenting.
• Related, whether I can do a full marathon is an unknown. The injury put a damper on things.
• I need to stretch and ice after runs. Whether it’s just the sheer amount of running, keto, or age, who knows. But I can’t ignore the soreness. It just gets worse if left unchecked.
• Six hours of sleep is not enough.
• Let’s be real. I’m out of keto right now. Christmas + Texas food.
• I should probably drink less.
• Heart feels fine. Went in and did a stress test with a sports cardiologist in October. He also is against training for a full marathon, but I think he and my regular cardiologist are in cahoots.

I’ve been maintaining about 12 miles per week, not really paying attention to pace. I’m going to start signing up for halves to give me more discipline. Again, I’ll target four. Not doing 3M, and sure as shit not doing San Juan Island Half. Probably three here in Washington with the fourth being Portland or San Diego.

I just started a new job, but I never say no to meeting recruiters because free coffee.

I met up with a new recruiter and the subject got on keto and performance. He apparently is not only also a keto believer, but his sport of choice is stair climbing. Seriously, there are competitions where people run up and down skyscrapers. I’ve never heard of this. And he’s really good at it. He rattled off a bunch of these races where he’s come in first.

The discussion touched on The Art and Science of Low Carb Performance, which is the bible for, well, low carb performance. It’s written by two accomplished pioneers in the field. Yes, I’ve read it. I thought it was good, however here’s a summary of the book: “Could keto help by doing x? Theoretically it might but more research needs to be done.” Substitute x with anything – recovery, performance, injury prevention, whatever. The book discusses all of it.

It’s an interesting book, but I like to read the research papers before making judgments on whether the claims made are valid. However, as the authors acknowledge, more research needs to be done. I rate this book as “somewhat useful.”

On Thursday night (today is Tuesday) I banged my right foot against a bannister post. It’s been pretty painful, so I haven’t been running. Was keeping stead at 15 miles/week up to that point.

I finally went to get it checked out at an urgent care clinic. Confirmed fracture on the right index toe. I told the doctor I was mainly concerned about doing long term damage if I ran on it before it healed. He it should be fine as long as I didn’t over-do it. “I know you runners get antsy when you can’t run.”

Alright, then. Running shoes back on.

Hey, I came in third in my age group again. 1:11:45, 9:37 pace! On keto! This was a combined 5, 10, and 12K race.

Holy crap, it was cold out there. So freakin’ cold. 39 Fahrenheit at the start. I took running pants with me in the car, but felt confident it would warm up, so didn’t change into them. The problem is that the 12k group was the last group to go. Further, the trail is a bit narrow, so they had to throttle people. So here I am, freezing everything at the starting area, and there was a *ton* of people. My thermal shirt did its job. Fingers felt like they were going to fall off. At a certain temperature, gloves help very little. My legs were frozen, but that doesn’t really bother me from a comfort point of view. I was worried about pace, though.

Turns out, nothing to worry about. About two miles in, I felt normal, and it was just a nice run pretty much all along the Sammamish River. I even ran into a lady with a Buc-ee’s shirt. Gave her a “Howdy!” as I ran by.

This was the third and final Orca Running event of the season for me. I picked up the Friend of the Pod medal at the end, the one where you run three of their races, and what I’ve been working for all this time.
1) It’s acrylic. 2) They didn’t check if you ran three runs. They were just handing them out. Well, crap. At least it looks nice.

This is the night before the final run of the season.

I’ve worked my way up from 12 miles per week up to 18. Pace has been anywhere from 10-11:30. Legs and muscles are sore afterwards as always. I really have to be religious about post-run stretches to keep things under control.

Not worried about the three goals (1. Not die, 2. Finish, 3. Don’t walk) at all for tomorrow. Should be a easy.

I could have ran 13.1 miles today, but instead, paid a shit ton of money to watch the Aggies get whipped. At least I got to drank beer (legally) at Kyle Field.

My physical therapist hates everything that’s not physical therapy. That includes the Hypersphere I use to shake down calves and hamstrings. I’ve been using it for piriformis, but her opinion, among other opinions she has, is that it doesn’t help because it’s not small enough to “pinpoint the pain area.” I’m supposed to use a lacrosse ball for that.

The action involves pressing up against the wall with the ball, which is the size of a grapefruit, to release the muscles. This is hassle. You have to stand up in an awkward position, work it with your butt, and if you’re lucky, it’s not constantly dropping on the ground.

Well look at this. Hyperice made a hypersphere the size of a lacrosse ball. Mine arrived today, and it’s fantastic. All the precision of a lacrosse ball, but none of the work. I just lay there with the Mini Hypersphere under my butt and just let it vibrate.

Ha, take that, physical therapist.