• Autumn colours in Nikko

    I hired a car and mum booked a hotel for a few days in Nikko national park north of Tokyo.

    Day 1 – Nikko Cultural Tour

    On Tuesday morning I picked up the Honda Freed (a much larger car than I expected/wanted, but quite comfortable) and we drove up to Nikko.

    Once there we stopped at the temples and shrines, checking out Nikkō Tōshō-gū shrine complex with the famous three wise monkeys (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil) and the Sleeping Cat carving. From there we headed to Nikko Futarasan jinja temple complex admiring some beautiful autumn leaves in the grounds.

    After the temples we walked down to the river, enjoyed some karaage (fried chicken), and checked out the Shinkyo Bridge set beautifully into the autumn forest lining the banks of the Daiya River.

    Getting late, we headed back to the car and drove up into the mountains to Hotel Yunishigawa. It’s quite a bit bigger than we really wanted, but it’s set quite secluded in the mountains and has very nice onsen. We made it in time for a quick dip in the onsen before the buffet dinner.

    First day done; otsukaresamadeshita.

    Day 2- Waterfalls and Autumn Colours

    After a nice buffet breakfast we set off for momiji (autumn leaves viewing). The road ended up being blocked at 5km or so away from the hotel – shortly after I had made a comment that the last time I was riding a motorbike I kept coming across blocked roads! So we had to turn back around and retrace the road we had used the night before to get to the hotel.

    We first drove to Ryuzu Falls near Lake Chuzenji, but on the way we also stopped off at a couple of dams to take pictures. Ryuzu Falls was actually less spectacular than I remembered, but I could still enjoy a quick lunch of Ozouni (basically mochi in a clear vegetable soup) and Yubakaraage, the “new speciality food in Nikko” consisting of fried tofu skin.

    After that we headed to the famous Kegon falls, which really are quite spectacular. To fully appreciate them, one must take a lift down to a viewing platform deep in the canyon.

    As it was getting quite late by now, we made our way back to the hotel for another evening of onsen and buffet dinner.

    Day 3 – Nikko Nature Tour

    The third day in Nikko dawned better than expected, and after a bit of thinking, we decided to go to Shiobara and do the ravine walk as it was billed as one of the must-do nature experiences in Nikko.

    So we had a nice drive to Shiobara through beautiful autumn-leave-lined roads. Along the way I helped a group of elderly tourists to change a tire as they had a flat, and in return they gave us all their snacks and a big bag of tomatoes. I felt really bad for taking it, but they insisted.

    Arriving at Shiobara, we parked at the visitor centre as I had not been able to find definitive information on where the walking trail started on the internet. After a quick attempt to chat to the staff there (mostly in japanese) we did get the information we were after. He mostly tried to get us to go down into town to see the autumn leaves on a couple of bridges, but we wanted nature, so we headed off to the walking trail which actually started at the visitor centre.

    The trail itself, unfortunately, was very underwhelming; the first part was along the river bank through the end of town which did have some beautiful autumn leaf views but from there it was a bit of a scramble through the forest with few views of the river or autumn leaves. We also didn’t make it all the way to the dam as we were pooped.

    When we got back, we did check out the suspension bridge opposite the visitor centre which gave some very impressive views; we could’ve saved the forest walk! There was also a walkway beside the river and we walked up the river a little bit to enjoy the views.

    We then drove into town to find some lunch, stopping at a tiny local ramen shop. We enjoyed some delicious ramen, then, after briefly returning to the suspension bridge to retrieve my jumper which I had left lying there as I changed camera lenses, we started heading back in the direction of our hotel, but I wanted to drive through town to mix it up a bit.

    As luck would have it, we drove past the “#1 spot” in town, another smaller suspension bridge, but the autumn leaves here were truly spectacular, with unreal deep reds. A quick photo stop, but the place was too overrun with people to really be enjoyable.

    Finally back on the road, we took a couple of scenic routes back to our hotel for a final night of onsen.

    Day 4 – Nasu Ropeway and the long drive home

    Being somewhat tuckered out after the last few days of walking, we decided to take it easier and take a ropeway up to Mt Chasau. It was quite a long drive again, made longer by taking a detour to take in some new scenery instead of driving along the same roads again.

    It was quite a lovely drive, with the weather better than expected. Part-way along we stopped at a roadway stop for a necessary break (too much coffee) and they had lovely grape ice-cream there. Despite it only being 7C or so, we enjoyed a cone each.

    The Nasu Ropeway starts quite high up the mountains already, giving a great view over the valley and far mountains before even starting up. The ride up only takes a few minutes, but climbs nearly 300m vertically. From the top the view is breathtaking! There’s also several walks one can do, the shortest (but steepest) is to the top of Mt Chasau (1915m), which is a volcano still emitting a little bit of steam and smoke.

    Mum decided she’d had enough climbing and walking but said I should go anyway. So I ran up to the top (a sign said about an hour to the top; I was back at the ropeway station in just over 30 minutes..) but unfortunately the top was covered in mist so I could only barely make out the crater. It also had started snowing slightly, and I couldn’t see any smoke coming out, so after a quick picture I turned back around.

    Back at the ropeway station we enjoyed a kakiage-soba lunch before taking the ropeway back down to our car and commencing the long drive back home.

    The drive ended up taking over 5 hours, with a significant delay at one point due to a broken down truck on the side of the road causing a huge traffic jam. Finally back home, I quickly dropped off the car and we enjoyed a late dinner of tomato salad and bread.


  • Server – upgrade to Debian 11 “bullseye”

    After doing a desktop upgrade (From Debian 11 to Debian 12 (still in testing)), and upgrading my NAS, I also discovered my server was on Debian “oldstable” aka “buster”, with support ending in August 2022; ie, already past!

    So after taking a snapshot I upgraded the server to Debian 11 aka “stable” aka “bullseye”.

    The upgrade went quite smoothly, the only issue being that the mariadb-server package didn’t get installed for some reason, which left roundcube in an unconfigured state. Manually installing mariadb-server and resuming the upgrade fixed that.

    A handful of configuration files needed some minor tweaking, then it was off to a reboot.

    The system rebooted just fine, and a quick check of the most important services (email, cloud) seemed to show no problems.

    Shortly afterwards I started getting some email notifications thoughl it seems that Nextcloud now requires php to have memory caching enabled. This required adding “apc.enable_cli” to be added to the php config files and all good.

    Will see if it requires anything else over the next few days.

    EDIT 2022-10-06 : exim4

    Turns out the online-suggested fix broke my configuration using the vdom router.
    All I needed to do is change $domain -> $domain_data to fix the “tained domain” errors, instead of taking the entire suggested fix.


  • Bike Trip 2021 – Day 3

    The day started rainy. Very rainy. Despite Brians warning I had left my clothes out to dry which were soaked again of course. Oh well..

    I wasted time till nearly 10am when the rain eased off, then ran out and bought an umbrella. Of course as soon as I stepped out of the shop the rain stopped, proving once again that you don’t need an umbrella to keep the rain off you, but rather, to stop the rain. I grabbed some breakfast at a french bakery and a much needed cup of coffee, then headed off to the castle.

    The castle was pretty neat, and contains an old gun museum. The guns were collected by somebody local and then donated to Matsumoto city, they are all period-weapons of the castle. The castle was already built with guns in mind, containing both arrow slits as well as gun ports. Unfortunately there was very little else on display, but still, it’s well worth a visit.

    As the weather had improved I decided to go for a ride-out, having already decided to stay another night at the Backpackers. So sans luggage I took off and headed up into the mountains where, of course, the rain started again. The road itself was great, but there was a fair bit of traffic on it which was a bit annoying. The river down in the ravine had several dams across it, bringing it up closer to the road level after each dam.

    Eventually I turned off onto a side-road, which was supposed to go up a pass at over 2000m. But, as so often around here, eventually the road was blocked and not allowed to continue. This time there was a little guard hut to stop people. Apparently to get up to the pass I had to take a bus, but the last bus had already left. No amount of pleading would let them let me through. Bah!

    On the upside there was a short hiking trail to a waterfall, and even in the pouring rain it was well worth the hike. Eventually I came to a triple-waterfall which was very impressive, especially with all the rain.

    I checked with the road-guards about another pass, and they assured me the road was open. So I headed that way, hoping to be able to do a loop back to Matsumoto instead of retracing my route. The road looked a bit ominous though, looking a little bit neglected with some grass growing in cracks and covered in leaves and twigs from the recent storms. Turning a corner, I came across a whole horde of monkeys, which scampered off the road and into the trees, screeching at me for having disturbed them. Seems it’s been a while since a car last came this way…

    My concerns proved right – shortly after the pass, the road was blocked by a chain. Gah!!! By now the rain was coming down in buckets again, so after a brief thought I decided against doing a different, longer loop back and instead plotted a route to the nearest onsen as I was soaked to the skin by now despite wearing my “waterproofs”. An absolute delight to sink into the hot water!!

    From the onsen I headed back the way I’d come, again, lots of traffic so not very enjoyable. Once I cleared out of the mountains, the rain also let up and on the far side of the plain the sun was even striking some mountains! So I replotted to head to the far mountains for a bit of sunny riding, but just as I started getting close the wind picked up and very black ominous-looking clouds closed in. I also happened to be quite close to my hostel, so I called it quits for the day, remembering the cold beer I had left in the fridge.

    Great day despite the rain! Now to find some dinner and then decide where to go tomorrow..


  • Bike Trip 2021 – Day 2

    The day dawned drizzly. Heavy drizzly. Ok, rainy! The river had swelled and was now a muddy brown pouring down the valley. I had some left-over bread for breakfast, settled with the owner, and put on my wet weather gear.

    I had initially thought to just head towards Matsumoto which was predicted to be sunny as quickly as possible, but ended up heading up into the mountains for a loop of the upstream reservoir instead. Glad I did as there were some pretty impressive bridges, and views from them, leading up to it. Just for a change the “loop road” was not closed so I could do the loop, although the minor road was quite minor…

    Heading out of the mountains the rain soon stopped and I rejoined the 299 to continue on to Matsumoto. The 299 now had a very varied character, from absolutely stunning road with fast sweeping bends and great asphalt to just a small country road.  At one point I saw a sign to a cave and, a quick u-turn later, headed up a very steep little access road to it.

    Fujido Cave turned out to be a mixed bag. The Japanese fondness of concrete and infrastructure took a lot of the character out of the cave, but I guess they have to make it accessible. Still, it’s worth a quick visit if you’re passing by with some neat rock formations. There’s also an impressive suspension bridge nearby, not recommended if you get vertigo!

    Continuing on, the 299 eventually became very small and then stopped – it was blocked off as so many other roads were. A couple of people in a small pickup truck gave me directions on how to continue on to Matsumoto, which turned out to be along the 45 until I could continue westwards on the 254. This road was also pretty nice in places. Along the way I stopped at a rest stop for some lunch and ended up buying some deer obento from a guy selling it out of the back of a “Ente”, a Citroen 2CV.

    Some great riding later I finally reached Mastumoto, detoured past the castle for a quick first look, and checked into the Backpackers run by a very friendly chap from Ireland. Time to do some shopping for some essentials (soap, shaver, towel), a quick freshen-up, and then I wandered in search of dinner. I ate some yakitori as it had outdoor seating and enjoyed my first beers with dinner in a long time – unlike Tokyo, Matsumoto still allows alcohol! Then I took some great night-time pictures of Mastumoto castle before turning in for the night.


  • Bike Trip 2021 – Day 1

    So feeling a bit down due to the incoming weather forecasts, I waved bye to my friend Edith, who was off to Okinawa for the week and had kindly offered to lend me her bike, a KTM750. I decided to at the very least do a quick loop on the bike around Tokyo before going home. Finding a park near Kanagawa River as my destination, I set off. Despite city-riding and traffic, HUGE SMILE!

    Enroute I found a small shrine and looped back to take a picture of the bike in front of it, then asked for safe riding from the local deity. Just before reaching the park, the heavens opened up and my jeans were soaked through to the balls in no time. So I guess the prayer backfired? I still stopped at the park and sheltered under a tree until the rain slowed and then stopped shortly afterwards.

    Riding back I stopped at a couple of spots to take some pictures and by the time I got back to Edith’s I went “stuff it”, packed a couple of tshirts and a toothbrush, found a cheap hotel somewhere in the mountains, and headed off.

    Best decision ever! Weather stayed dry and even though most of the trip was along city roads, which did eventually get wearisome, I was still very happy to be on the road on a bike again. Just bliss not having to think, just ride. At one stage I went over some hills with giant TV antennae which seemed to be a bit of a built-up version of Mt Cootha back in Brisbane. Unfortunately I was past it before I could think to find a spot to stop to take a pic.

    Eventually though the city roads petered out and things got awesome as I slowly climbed into the mountains. Especially the 299 is a really nice road once you get past any traffic – a bit tricky since it’s all yellow-lines, but there are a few traffic lights.

    With only 20 minutes to go to my destination, and my clutch-hand feeling decidedly sore after all the earlier city riding, I saw a big dam and shortly afterwards a road leading up to it, so off I went. Pretty spectacular! I was going to do a complete loop of the reservoir, but it turned out that the road on one side of it is blocked off for some reason. Still an awesomely scenic spot.

    I kept going and found my hotel – a very traditional-looking japanese inn nestled high above the road. Upon entering the first thing is a common room with a wood-fired stove, rather rustic looking. The owner is a youngish-chap though (I was expecting a fossil to be honest) with two young girls and made me welcome. We managed to communicate and I got shown to my room. After that I sat down for a bit to relax, then hiked down to the river and had a swim. Great, now not only are my jeans still damp, but my only pair of shorts is wet as well… but it was worth it!

    By the evening other guests had arrived and we enjoyed a small fire outside while chatting and eating dinner – home-cooked chicken which was very delicious. When the rain came back we all went into the common room where one guy kindly shared some sake and, later on, some food. Despite my lack of japanese it was an enjoyable evening.

    Time for bed, going to try to go to Matsumoto tomorrow to have a look at the famous black castle!


  • Upgrading Nextcloud 15 to 19 on Debian …

    So my Debian 9 server was still running Nextcloud 15. Meanwhile Nextcloud 20 is out.

    When I looked at performing the (manual) update I actually found a Nextcloud 16 download already in place but it seems I never completed that. Not long afterwards I discovered why – Nextcloud 16 requires PHP 7.3, but Debian 9 only has PHP 7.0 available.

    Long story short, instead of chimera’ing my Debian install I bit the bullet and decided to finally upgrade the server to Debian 10

    Some time later…

    After the server upgrade completed I was able to use the Nextcloud web interface to upgrade to Nextcloud 16.. and 17… and 18… and 19… and 20!

    That’s were the fun stopped, many things were broken in NC20 (apps just showing blank pages), so, having taken a backup between every upgrade, I rolled back to NC19 (incidentally validating that my backups worked).

    Most things worked out of the box. Critically for me, Grauphel did not.

    Long story short, it turns out that on Debian 10, the version of the PHP OAuth package is actually not compatible with the installed version of PHP 7.3! Installing a binary-compatible package from the Debian package snapshots site fixed this.

    Amongst other things I did during the upgrade cycles was:

    • changed the database to 4-byte suppport allowing for more characters in paths and comments.
    • fixed several other minor PHP configuration issues which Nextcloud was warning about.
    • fixed support for Maps (Nextcloud bug in the upgrade scripts left some database columns misconfigured:
      • Column name "oc_maps_address_geo"."object_uri" is NotNull, but has empty string or null as default.
      • The fix was to manually edit the scripts.
    • wrote backup scripts backing up the Nextcloud directory, the database, and, optionally, the data directory.


  • Upgrading Debian 9 to Debian 10

    Triggered by needing to upgrade Nextcloud, I finally bit the bullet and decided to upgrade my virtually-hosted Debian server from Debian 9 “stretch” to Debian 10 “buster”.

    The upgrade, as usual, was fairly trivial:

    apt-get update
    apt-get upgrade
    <edit /etc/apt/sources.conf to point to the new version>
    apt-get update
    apt-get upgrade
    apt-get full-upgrade
    reboot

    There were various configuration files which needed tweaking during and after the upgrade. vimdiff was very useful. I also learned a new screen feature – split-screen! (Ctrl-a – |). Finally a shoutout to etckeeper for maintaining a full history of all edits made in /etc.

    Post-upgrade Issues and Gotchas

    dovecot (imap server)

    A huge issue was that I could no longer access my emails from anywhere.

    Turns out that dovecot was no longer letting me log in. The mail log file had numerous “Can’t load DH parameters” error entries. I had not merged in a required change to the ssl certificate configuration.

    exim4 (mail server)

    The second huge issue was that exim was no longer processing incoming mail. Turns out that spamd wasn’t started after the reboot. Fixed by:

    systemctl start spamassassin.service
    systemctl enable spamassassin.service

    shorewall (firewall)

    Another major gotcha: the shorewall firewalls were not automatically re-enabled, and it took me three days to notice. Yikes! I had left the server on sys-v init instead of systemctl and the upgrade had silently switched over. After restarting the firewall, use systemctl enable to configure it to start on bootup.

    systemctl start shorewall.service
    systemctl enable shorewall.service
    systemctl start shorewall6.service
    systemctl enable shorewall6.service

    bind9 (name server)

    Another item was that bind was no longer starting up – it needed a tweak to the apparmor configuration. Appears that on my server the log files are written to a legacy directory and the new default configuration prevented bind from writing into it and hence failing to start up.

    Miscellaneous

    • I finally removed dovecot spam from syslog by giving it its own logfiles (tweaking fail2ban accordingly).
    • Various PHP options needed tweaking and several new modules needed installing to support Nextcloud (manually installed so no dependency tracking).

    Later Updates

    • Discovered that phpldapadmin was broken. Manually downloaded and installed an updated version from “testing”.

  • New Scuba Toy – Shearwater Peregrine

    Just bought a Shearwater Peregrine as a backup for my Shearwater Perdix AI (budget didn’t quite stretch to a second Perdix..)

    Haven’t dived it yet, but following are my immediate unboxing impressions (pictures (via Google image search)).

    The good:

    • Familiar layout and the same great screen as the Perdix.
    • Smaller and lighter form factor than the Perdix.
    • Mostly full-featured recreational dive computer with some intro-to-tec features.
      • No AI/compass
      • Up to 100% O2 and 3 gases
      • Lots of “tec” displays
    • Built-in battery charging is via the Qi wireless standard, so absolutely no exposed contacts.
      • But due to wrist-straps/bungees it may be difficult to use generic Qi charging pads.
    • Dive download via Bluetooth (hopefully works better than the Perdix!)

    The bad:

    • Buttons are physical rather than the piezo-electric ones from the Perdix (subjective).
    • Battery is a built-in rechargeable battery (subjective).
    • Limited display customisation (as compared to the Perdix).
    • Screen protector is a standard thin protector rather than the thick gel-like one of the Perdix.

    The ugly:

    • The charging pad uses a micro-USB cable rather than USB-C (for a brand-new product, I would expect it to use the latest standards)
    • Still fairly large (although required to support the screen, the bezel _could_ be a bit smaller given the target market)
    • No compass or Air Integration (for the price-point, many competing products offer these features)