🦇 Credits

"Nos honram, eles que vieram antes." — we honor those who came before.

The Nosferato saga ran on shoulders. Here are them.

Primary docs (the canonical truth)

• 📜 Raspberry Pi documentation — bootloader — what the mask-ROM expects, partition layout, boot stages
• 📜 Raspberry Pi documentation — configuration — config.txt, cmdline.txt reference
• 📜 Debian raspi-firmware package file list — the canonical "where do firmware files live"
• 📜 archive.raspberrypi.com/debian — Pi Foundation's apt repo. The breakthrough.

Reference implementations

• 🛠️ Kali ARM build scripts — raspberry-pi-zero-2-w.sh — the apt-based architecture pattern we eventually adopted. Cite the line apt-get -y -q install raspi-firmware linux-image-rpi-v8 ...
• 🛠️ RPi-Distro/pi-gen — official Pi OS build pipeline. We did NOT use it (sticking to debootstrap base for provenance), but its stage layout informed our thinking.
• 🛠️ RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree — the Pi-Foundation-curated firmware tree. Symlinked into our firmware-brcm80211 install path.
• 🛠️ peebles/rpi3-wifi-station-ap — the canonical uap0-virtual-interface recipe for STA+AP on one wifi radio. Slated for S01E15 (mgmt AP bake-in).

Critical issues / forum threads

• 🐛 Raspberry Pi forum t=380824 — Missing wlan0 on Pi Zero 2 W Rev 1.0 — exact symptom we hit in Arc 7
• 🐛 Raspberry Pi forum t=366620 — Bullseye→Bookworm breaks wifi on Pi 0W (regulatory.db fix) — the regulatory.db / rfkill-unblock connection
• 🐛 raspberrypi/linux#6317 — txcap_blob err=-2 is cosmetic — saved us from chasing a red herring
• 🐛 RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree#27 — BCM43430/2 firmware — the silicon-rev naming maze
• 🐛 Arch Linux ARM forum — brcmfmac43436 firmware missing — confirmation that the naming hydra is real

Tooling — the diagnostic toolkit

• 🔧 debugfs — e2fsprogs swiss-army knife. Read ext4 partitions without mounting.
• 🔧 journalctl -D /path — replay captured systemd journals from elsewhere
• 🔧 multipass (Canonical) — lightweight Ubuntu VMs on macOS, arm64 native
• 🔧 debootstrap — bootstrap a Debian root from scratch
• 🔧 e2fsck -fy — replay a captured ext4 journal so debugfs reads consistently

Companion tools / distros surveyed (didn't switch to, learned from)

• DietPi — what minimal-Debian-on-Pi looks like
• Alpine Linux for Raspberry Pi — tiny-musl approach (~150MB)
• OpenWrt for bcm27xx — pure wifi-router OS
• Buildroot raspberrypizero2w_64_defconfig — assemble-from-scratch route

Acknowledgements

• Pi Foundation — for archive.raspberrypi.com/debian. Saved the day in Arc 8.
• Cypress / Broadcom — for the BCM43430 family of wifi chips (despite the naming chaos).
• The user — for the empirical proof in S01E12 (flashed PINN, demonstrated the Pi was alive), for redirecting us to "stop guessing" in Arc 8 (the moment we abandoned trial-and-error and did proper research), and for the NOS-FERA-RATO etymology that gives this whole thing its identity. Nos honram.

Citation format

If you re-use any of this in your own writing or another project:

S01E14 of the Nosferato saga, NearTrace project, Hartle Tech.
https://docs.neartrace.app/nosferato/saga/e14-whack-a-mole
2026-05-12

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