Peewee, Python CGI, GPT, ADS-B, Icebreakers

• Just checked out latest version of Peewee, so much new stuff and goodness. Very pleased and happy I've chosen Peewee as my defacto ORM for projects which require ORM.
• Found out that even the cgi.test() "robust test routine" fails with binary data and PUT. Nice, so nice. Well, we decided to drop the PUT option and went for traditional form POST method.
• Enjoyed process of replacing old drive with larger one and finding out that the boot disk requires MBR -> GPT conversion. Let's see how well this works out. At least gdisk on Linux and gptgen on Windows should work flawlessly. But because it's important system, I really can't do that without making full disk image first. Just in case to be sure and not sorry. Also the gptgen seems to be nicely done, it creates backup and so on as well as allows creating preview sectors, which can be first checked and then deployed etc. I guess I'll first test gptgen and if that won't work out then I'll try gdisk. It's of course also possible that the boot chain geest broken and then I'll need to run bootrec /fixboot if that would help. I don't deal with boot details too often, so it's easy to forget all the things necessary to system to boot up properly. But luckily there are several good guides, which you can use to remind your self when required. - As usual things didn't work out as planned. gptgen just lead to corrupt GPT partition table. gpart did work perfectly with create fresh GPT from MBR, but this naturally lead to broken Windows boot sequence. Sigh... Let's see if the fixboot will fix it, or not. Got kind of worried, because windows boot fix is taking hours. I find that kind of scary. I was expecting it to take a minute at max. When writing key data to disk. Now the fix is taking so long, I'm worried it's totally messing something up. Or maybe it's adding some UEFI / BOOT partitions, moving existing partitions would naturally require lot of time. In traditional Microsoft style, there's no progress indicator nor any information what's being actually done. - Sigh. Let's see, after this process, it either boots or not, if it doesn't then I'll just restore latest image of the system, with the good old MBR back. Repair is still running after 4 hours. Only thing I could imagine taking so long, is that if the repair is actually relocating some partitions on the disk. I remain highly skeptical about it. But it it would happen, that would be way cool. - Unfortunately the repair did run over 8 hours and did nothing at all. Great work, this is actually quite like the result I was expecting it to have. Duh! - Last try using the bootrec /fixboot and let's see what happens. Next attempt restoring disk once again from image and retrying with diskpart. And bootrec /fixboot. GPT conversion worked flawlessly several times, but Windows just doesn't work with it. Let's hope this attempt works out. It seems that the answer is nope, nope and nope. Next step is to restore image, and then try checking some vital GPT information from another computer and trying to use that to fix the system. After that it's probably best to conclude that it just won't work and full system re installation is required. Which is going to be even more horrible task. But isn't that just why this job is being done? But that job needs to be resumed later. The systems are failure resistant, but extended failure is bad, so 24 hours fixing and 24 hours online, and then again 24 hours for fixing... Sigh. I also tried to use diskpart to convert the MBR to GPT but it says it's impossible. Well, maybe the full installation is required for disk replacement, which is extremely annoying, expensive and time consuming. Well, I have to continue this next week. Otherwise there's too much distribution to basic processes. Good thing is that I've already found some more stuff I can try later. Like a new tool I didn't even know about: BCDBOOT. Anyway, it seems that the partition table also requires some mangling before it will work after the GPT conversion, which won't work with DISKPART for some strange reason. But luckily gdisk is able to do it.
• Reminded my self about: ADS-B and read something different: Polaris Finnish icebreaker

2019-06-18