BORK!BORK!BORK! Paris might sometimes be called “The City of Light” or perhaps “The City of Love” by the romantically inclined. Judging by this hotel’s elevators, “The City of Bork” is more appropriate.
Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Nathaniel in a Paris hotel, what we assume to be digital signage is instead stalled on the all too familiar American Megatrends BIOS configuration screen. The computer behind the scenes also seems a bit overpowered to serve information for hotel services.
Instead of enticing elevator riders into the undoubtedly delightful bars and restaurants of the establishment (apparently a Novotel not far from the Eiffel Tower) or whatever it should be doing, this screen has temptations of an altogether more technical nature.
A CometLake CPU? An i5 no less? Sort of up-to-date. And that 8 GB of RAM? The way memory prices are going, that might be enough to buy you a nice hotel room in some cities, and at least a decent coffee and a croque monsieur in Paris.
All we want is a page that shows various stats about work related things. They refresh every 20 minutes to get the latest info. But the most common point of failure is the network. Wired PIs seem fine, but wireless? Nah.
The PIs are set to fully reboot once a week, but even that doesn’t work. At least once a week at least one will just disconnect from the network and not reconnect. I set up something to restart the network service since I found out that’s what was failing, but that doesn’t fix all of them. Sometimes they’ll just completely lock up. So at least once a month someone will have to manually reboot one of them. Most are in easy to reach places, but a few require some OSHA violations to get to.
Oh wow, amazing. Well, the Raspberry Pis all have Broadc*m SOCs. Which means they have relatively good mainline Linux support overall, but that also means Broadc*m Wi-Fi. That’s god awful. I’ve witnessed two laptops with these and on both it’s miserable. My lifehack of sorts was making a desktop shortcut and/or shell alias:
sudo rmmod wl && sudo modprobe wl.