On Mon, Dec 30, 2024 at 05:29:05AM -0600, Tom Browder wrote:

I suspect a failing disk,

My main home PC is 10 years old and still going strong (I over specced it when I bought it). A few years ago I had what looked like disk problems (time outs, failed writes, ...). I replaced the power supply and the problems went away.

I have seen this before: some power supplies seem to fade as they age and the symptom is disk failures.

Changing the PSU is cheap, quick & easy - consider it.

--
Alain Williams
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On 12/30/24 06:37, Alain D D Williams wrote:

On Mon, Dec 30, 2024 at 05:29:05AM -0600, Tom Browder wrote:

I suspect a failing disk,

My main home PC is 10 years old and still going strong (I over specced it when
I bought it). A few years ago I had what looked like disk problems (time outs,
failed writes, ...). I replaced the power supply and the problems went away.

I have seen this before: some power supplies seem to fade as they age and the symptom is disk failures.

Changing the PSU is cheap, quick & easy - consider it.

Excellent advice, applies to most name brand psu's as they drift low
with age. The no-name supplies you can get for a $15 bill by the
wagonload in China are often the longer lasting psu's. They will fail immediately, or more likely run for a decade or more.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis

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Tom Browder wrote:

On Mon, Dec 30, 2024 at 05:37 Alain D D Williams <addw@phcomp.co.uk> wrote:

On Mon, Dec 30, 2024 at 05:29:05AM -0600, Tom Browder wrote:

I suspect a failing disk,

My main home PC is 10 years old and still going strong (I over specced it when
I bought it). A few years ago I had what looked like disk problems (time outs,
failed writes, ...). I replaced the power supply and the problems went away.

Unfortunately this is a leased, remote server. But I can ask the company to check the PSU.

Then you can also stop all daemons, run sync, and ask the
company to power-cycle it. Quite possibly they provide a console
for you to do that yourself.

-dsr-

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On Mon, 30 Dec 2024, Tom Browder wrote:

I've had this problem a long time ago, and don't remember how I recovered, but it was with help here.

I suspect a failing disk, and I wonder if there is a hail Mary command I
can do to force a reboot to see if it can recover on its own. I would
almost welcome starting over with a new server.

I can login and su to root. I have not been able to inspect logs yet due to time.

I see a 2023 Debian thread getting into lots of low-level fsck and other things, but can my old brain and trembly fingers hack it without
compounding the problem?

Opinions requested, please.

-Tom

Oh, I do have backups of my important stuff.

if you can su to root, and provided that inittab hasn't been corrupted,
then
reboot
will force a reboot. But without ipmi or equivalent, if it doesn't come
up then you're completely stuffed without physical access.

My provider has a shareable kvm that you can 'book'. I have the ibm
equivalent (IMM) so never needed to try it.

Even my home machines have ipmi, it is so useful to have bios access
without needing to attach a screen.

Tim.

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