Thanks for your help, Francis Daly

[Francis Daly]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2022 at 11:41:25PM -0600, Jim Taylor wrote:

Hi there,

> Thank you for helping me unmake a mess!

You're welcome.

> I had mistyped " ' " for " ` ".  To be honest, in 60 years in this business
> I had never typed " `  " on purpose before, so I typed single quotes around
> "lsb_release -cs"

There's a whole keyboard full of characters there; why leave the edge
ones out? ;-)

(Although the `backtick is often awkward to type, because it often a
"dead key" which only show on-screen after the subsequent keypress.)

Given the choice for retyping commands or error messages, copy-paste is
usually a good option. Although that can go wrong when something decides
to auto-convert plain quotes to something prettier in typography, so
there is no one good answer.

> Now everything seems to have run correctly, but ...
> 
> When I do an apt-get update, the line after the 5 'hit' messages and
> 'Reading Package Lists' says
> 
> "N:  Skipping acquire of configured file 'nginx/binary-arnhf/Packages' 
> because the repository doesn't support armhf (or something like that)"

In this case, it sounds like you may be running one of the Debian-derived
raspberry pi OS's; possibly the one for Raspberry Pi 2 which uses the
32-bit "armhf" architecture. Debian provides binaries built for that
architecture; RaspberryPi provides binaries built for that architecture;
Nginx does not provide binaries built for that architecture.

If that is the case, then the quick-and-easy option is for you to remove
the nginx repository from your system config -- which is "remove or
#-comment the line that you recently edited". Then the next time you run
"apt-get update", it will only use the other configured sources.

That means that you will continue to get whichever nginx version is
provided by the other sources, and you won't get the errors about
skipping arm-hf.

If you do want to run "the latest" nginx version on your system, then
you will need to have a binary built for your system.

That could be any of (in no particular order):

* install an "arm64" version of Debian -- nginx does provided binaries
built for that architecture
* build an "armhf" binary of nginx for yourself whenever you want
to update
* see if someone else has built an "armhf" binary of nginx that you are
happy to use
* encourage someone else to build an "armhf" binary of nginx for you


"Simplest to use right now" is probably "stick with the Debian version"
-- you won't get the new features of later nginx versions, but Debian
will (try to) incorporate any security-related fixes and issue a new
build then.

"More educational in your Copious Free Time(TM)" is probably to build an
nginx binary for yourself -- either as a "normal" binary build, or as a
package suitable for your current system -- and then build-and-replace
whenever there is an interesting update to the nginx source code.

And, depending on the hardware that you have and what other things you
want to run on it, possibly "simplest to support for the future" could be
"re-install the operating system as the arm64 version".

> Is this normal?  Do I need to do another do over?

It is an informational message which basically says "now that I look,
I'm not using anything from that source this time"; so having that source
listed does no harm, but removing that source will mean that it won't
try to look the next time.

> Thanks again for your help.  Now I can build a configuration file and get my
> website back on the air.

Cheers; and good luck with it,

	f
-- 
Francis Daly        francis at daoine.org