The hardware is a Pi Zero (the very slow original one) with an MMDVM hat, all tucked away nicely in a case with a little display. I bought it from Radioddity in 2020. It works right now with the Pi-Star software, running version 4.1.8 with a 20240307 date. The operating system is old (based on Debian 10 "Buster").
It stays up for a long time and works without incident for 100+ days at a time. When I reboot it, I have a few issues.
I'm running Tailscale on the device for remote access. Tailscale wants to have a read/write filesystem to keep logs and manage keys. Pi-Star wants the whole SD card to be read only to avoid disk wear. Those two desires are in conflict.
The thing I do right now after a reboot is to log in on the local interface (without Tailscale) and run the rpi-rw command which makes the file systems writable. Then I can manually bring Tailscale up. This takes a minute every three months, which is tolerable but not ideal. It would be much less ideal if I didn't have local LAN access to the device, e.g. if it were in some far-away place in a hut on the side of the road. But it's not, the hotspot is in the attic.
I could spend some time manually adjusting the Pi-Star configuration, following these instructions from VK3ERW: Pi-Star How To: make file system Read/Write (RW). "Note: Some of the files modified in this procedure may be overwritten during future Pi-Star upgrades."
I could add a systemd unit that would run the rpi-rw as a "oneshot" command as a prerequisite to starting the Tailscale service, or as a "drop-in" modifier to Tailscale. If I'm doing a "drop-in", the command systemctl edit tailscaled is the mechanism for doing that edit. I see informative discussion at
https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/5399 . My tolerance for doing systemd hacking comes and goes, and this is likely to take more than a minute every three months to do, but it would be a suitable place to learn.
I could switch from Pi-Star to WPSD, which has a nicer dashboard but doesn't run on my Pi Zero hardware. (I'd need a faster Zero like the 2W.) WPSD has stopped running in read-only mode since an update in 2023. https://w0chp.radio/wpsd/
The solution for now is log in, manually reconfigure, and write this blog post describing my other options. Future me will need to decide whether to spend money on this, or time hacking systemd, or just ignore the problem and push it down the road 100 days.
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