Things Degrade — Part 3

2025-05-19 • 1 min read • Tags: Sysadm Comp Politik

Ouch my raspberry Pi Zero became pretty much useless lately.😢 Yet another update to the list of things degrading.

I won this Pi during a local CTF back in 2015 (2016?). But it’s only in 2019 that it found its purpose when a colleague suggested I install Pi-hole on it. It’s been since USB-attached to my router (USB OTG mode / USB network connection) and running seamlessly1.

So what happened? I updated Pi-hole lately, which went well. But I thought it’d also be a good time for upgrading the underlying deprecated OS version.💥 Yeah well, latest versions of Raspberry Pi OS crash right after a fresh install.😬 And I can’t really install older versions as they are not supported by Pi-hole. After trying for multiple afternoons, I’m giving up.

💀 Bye Pi-hole.

💀 Bye Pi Zero. I hope to find you a new purpose at some point.

Note on one hand I do understand maintenance constraints, limited capacity and the focus on latest hardware and stacks. On the other hand, my otherwise perfectly working Pi Zero is not that old is it?


  1. Well it needed rare reboots after router upgrades. ↩︎