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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • I forced a shutdown of my Linux server by holding down the power button last night after it had been thrashing the harddisk for I don’t know how long.

    Wouldn’t respond to SSH so I just gave up, guess I could have tried to plug in a keyboard and use some magic keys.

    Maybe I should just remove the swapfile and let it kill something before it gets to that state. Or is that what swappiness setting is supposed to prevent? Only swap out stuff that is not actively used? In any case defaults don’t seem to work very well for me.

    Guess I’ll have to go boot it again today and try to find out what went wrong from the logs.








  • At some, long ago, the Ubuntu installer was offering to use zfs for the boot and root partitions. That sounded like a good idea and worked great for a long time, automatic snapshots, options to restore state at boot etc.

    Until my generous boot partition started to run out if space with all the snapshots (which were setup automatically and no obvious way to configure) OK no big deal, write a bash script that finds the old snapshots and delete them manually whenever boot is full again.

    Then one day recently my laptop wouldn’t boot anymore, Grub could no longer read the zfs on boot. Managed to boot with USB installation image, read zsf and chroot. Tried alot of things but in the end killed zfs and replace with ext4. Then made it boot again.

    Apparently I’m not the only one with this issue.