HDMI to the rescue!

Some of you may have read stuff I've written about FrankenPi before? It's a Raspberry Pi Cluster running a Docker Swarm. Now I had some issues with my personal web hosting in that the storage capacity I pay for was getting full and so to that end, I started deleting stuff like King Canute trying to command the tide from coming in! As it turned out, it was the Steemit Feed plugin I was using which was having trouble authenticating against the Steem API and was filling up the Wordpress error log.

One of the items I deleted to try and retrieve space was my TinyTiny feed reader so, I had the bright idea to run TinyTiny in a container on FrankenPi. The install went very well, I used Portainer to create the container and download the clue/ttrss Docker image. Everything went swimmingly until I realised that I would need to access it externally. Hmm? How about I create a new network in Portainer?

Suddenly, FrankenPi-01 (The Pi's range from 1 - 6) became unresponsive I couldn't even ssh in! "This is serious." I thought. I tried rebooting in the hope that whatever was eating up the resources would fail to start on boot? No such luck. Clearly, I needed to log in locally, actually logging into the Pi directly like you would your PC rather than remotely via ssh, but this was a problem. The big TV on the wall in my office was too far away to use the HDMI, and while I could move FrankenPi it would have been a complete faff unplugging everything.

Fortunately I work for an IT company so I nipped into the stock room and grabbed a brand new monitor. I didn't bother putting the stand on, all I was interested in was getting a display, plugged in a keyboard, Who needs a mouse?

Using the Docker commands I removed both the container and the Network I had created and Bingo! ssh burst back into life, the CPU returned to normal, the memory freed up and I could stop frying eggs on the raspberryPi board!