I am a 76 year old geek, still working part time in IT. I am part owner--
of a "4 guys in a garage" company doing high-reliability industrial data radios.
I have always subscribed to the principle of "Windows on the desktop,
Linux in the back-end", both at work and at home. My Windows desktop
system at home is a MINIX compact PC (NGC NR660) with an AMD Ryzen5
6600H with 16GB of RAM and 500 GB of SSD, running Win11 25H2.
My home Linux box is an an old Dell Precision 3630 with an i7-8700 CPU
at 3.2GHz with 16GB of DDR4 at 2666 MHz, 1TB SSD and 2x2TB HDD, running Fedora Workstation (F43, nightly updates) acting as
- SAMBA fileserver
- Apache webserver
- Postfix post office
- Dovecot IMAP server
- DigiKam photo archive (100,000 images)
My Internet connection is Frontier Business fiber 500GB with a static IP address (that is what makes it business) and an old Netgear edge router, which limits me to 100GB - which is more than I need.
During a recent large home renovation project (mold remediation) the
Linux box was sitting in my network closet, but kept running. At one
point, it overheated, and it appears that it got damaged. Every so
often, it would turn the root file system into read-only. When this happened, the email services would fail. It would recover on a reboot,
but fail again after an interval ranging from 45 minutes to 72 hours. Eventually, it failed to reboot, and I am now rebuilding it.
I tried hard to find clues to the failure, but when the root filesystem
- including /var/log - is not writeable, its pretty much a lost cause. I
was hoping to determine if it was DRAM, CPU or SSD that was going bad,
but since memtest86+ ran fine, I suspected the CPU. I did however decide that a system like this really needs to have ECC memory. Which has now
shot up dramatically in price.
As the reboot intervals grew shorter, I had looked for a replacement
box, and ordered another Dell Precision 3630 with the same CPU. To my surprise, it was not completely identical: It came with an HDMI port in addition to the two DisplayPort jacks. Not that it will do much for me:
I have a 4K video card in the expansion slot for the benefit of DigiKam.
When I moved the drives to the new chassis, the system would not boot. I eventually discovered a long forgotten fact: The SSD was formatted with
MBR instead of GPT. I converted it, but I cannot figure out how to get
GRUB to pick up my boot menu. Today I will try a new tack: Install the system fresh on the SSD from the new box, then add in the additional
file systems, migrating in the non-root ones from the old SSD last.
My greatest challenge in doing that, it that the "Live" installer wants
very much to make the root FS a btrfs. To avoid that, I need to manually
lay out my partitions, but the partitioning section of the installer
will not accept the EFI partition I create for it. Some nonsense about
what to call the partition type: EFI, VFAT or FAT32.
I feel very lonely struggling with this. I have not found anyone else in
my town that I can call on to be a second pair of eyes for this kind of work. There must be a couple of dozen people with the knowledge, but I
don't know them socially, and they are probably as old as myself. And
nobody seems to advertize professional services related to Linux system administration.
Is that true everywhere?
My Internet connection is Frontier Business fiber 500GB with a static IP address (that is what makes it business) and an old Netgear edge router, which limits me to 100GB - which is more than I need.
During a recent large home renovation project (mold remediation) the
Linux box was sitting in my network closet, but kept running. At one
point, it overheated, and it appears that it got damaged. Every so
often, it would turn the root file system into read-only. When this happened, the email services would fail. It would recover on a reboot,
but fail again after an interval ranging from 45 minutes to 72 hours. Eventually, it failed to reboot, and I am now rebuilding it.
I tried hard to find clues to the failure, but when the root filesystem
- including /var/log - is not writeable, its pretty much a lost cause. I
was hoping to determine if it was DRAM, CPU or SSD that was going bad,
but since memtest86+ ran fine, I suspected the CPU. I did however decide that a system like this really needs to have ECC memory. Which has now
shot up dramatically in price.
As the reboot intervals grew shorter, I had looked for a replacement
box, and ordered another Dell Precision 3630 with the same CPU. To my surprise, it was not completely identical: It came with an HDMI port in addition to the two DisplayPort jacks. Not that it will do much for me:
I have a 4K video card in the expansion slot for the benefit of DigiKam.
When I moved the drives to the new chassis, the system would not boot. I eventually discovered a long forgotten fact: The SSD was formatted with
MBR instead of GPT. I converted it, but I cannot figure out how to get
GRUB to pick up my boot menu. Today I will try a new tack: Install the system fresh on the SSD from the new box, then add in the additional
file systems, migrating in the non-root ones from the old SSD last.
Am 01.08.26 um 15:54 schrieb Lars Poulsen:
My Internet connection is Frontier Business fiber 500GB with a static
IP address (that is what makes it business) and an old Netgear edge
router, which limits me to 100GB - which is more than I need.
The units are wrong.
It is data per seconds, so 100GB (gigabytes!)/s would be possible, but
very unlikely for a home connection.
I assume it is 500 MBit/s and your router only has Fast Ethernet (100 MBit/), so limits it.
During a recent large home renovation project (mold remediation) the
Linux box was sitting in my network closet, but kept running. At one
point, it overheated, and it appears that it got damaged. Every so
often, it would turn the root file system into read-only. When this
happened, the email services would fail. It would recover on a reboot, LP>> but fail again after an interval ranging from 45 minutes to 72 hours.
Eventually, it failed to reboot, and I am now rebuilding it.
I tried hard to find clues to the failure, but when the root
filesystem - including /var/log - is not writeable, its pretty much a
lost cause. I was hoping to determine if it was DRAM, CPU or SSD that
was going bad, but since memtest86+ ran fine, I suspected the CPU. I
did however decide that a system like this really needs to have ECC
memory. Which has now shot up dramatically in price.
Do a badblocks test of all the disks/SSD. If it shows any errors, it is faulty.
surprise, it was not completely identical: It came with an HDMI port
in addition to the two DisplayPort jacks. Not that it will do much for LP>> me: I have a 4K video card in the expansion slot for the benefit of
DigiKam.
You can monitor CPU temperature and run "stress -c CORES" to test it
under load.
When I moved the drives to the new chassis, the system would not boot. LP>> I eventually discovered a long forgotten fact: The SSD was formatted
with MBR instead of GPT. I converted it, but I cannot figure out how
to get GRUB to pick up my boot menu. Today I will try a new tack:
Install the system fresh on the SSD from the new box, then add in the
additional file systems, migrating in the non-root ones from the old
SSD last.
You have to reinstall GRUB. This depends on whether the system is
installed in EFI mode or in BIOS mode.
I recommend using EFI mode. You can even do that on a disk with a msdos partition table (MBR).
On 2026-08-02 00:41, Marco Moock wrote:
Do a badblocks test of all the disks/SSD. If it shows any errors, it
is faulty.
I do not think that old-style badblock tests (reading/writing in user
mode) are valid on modern drives that do automatic behind-the-scenes remapping of bad sectors. With these, I am told that only SMART data
can give useful information. smartctl -a tells me that the SSD is fine.
-aLP>> As the reboot intervals grew shorter, I had looked for a replacement LP>> box, and ordered another Dell Precision 3630 with the same CPU. To my LP>> surprise, it was not completely identical: It came with an HDMI port LP>> in addition to the two DisplayPort jacks. Not that it will do much for LP>> me: I have a 4K video card in the expansion slot for the benefit of
DigiKam.
You can monitor CPU temperature and run "stress -c CORES" to test it
under load.
I never heard of that test before, but it appears to be in a optional
package called golang-x-tools-stress.
When I moved the drives to the new chassis, the system would not boot. LP>> I eventually discovered a long forgotten fact: The SSD was formatted LP>> with MBR instead of GPT. I converted it, but I cannot figure out how LP>> to get GRUB to pick up my boot menu. Today I will try a new tack:
Install the system fresh on the SSD from the new box, then add in the LP>> additional file systems, migrating in the non-root ones from the old LP>> SSD last.
You have to reinstall GRUB. This depends on whether the system is
installed in EFI mode or in BIOS mode.
Is there is useful how-to for this somewhere? And which GRUB ?
Apparently there is a GRUB and a GRUB2, and documentation is not very
clear about whether GRUB2 is a clean replacement for a deprecated GRUB
or they have different features that are useful in different circumstances.
(Of course, by the time I got this, I had already blown away my old SSD system drive. And by the way, everyone says "do an image backup of the
whole drive before any significant setup changes", but when the drive is
a TeraByte, you can spend many hours doing whole-drive copies.)
After a lot of Googling, I did not find useful information on how to
hand configure GRUB menus. Most of the how-tos talked about tools that worked on the currently running system, not how to do it when you were running a "rescue system" (such as a live USB stick) and wanting to set
up a system drive to be booted later.
I recommend using EFI mode. You can even do that on a disk with a
msdos partition table (MBR).
The ability of EFI supporting a mix of MBR and GPT drives is not well documented. But in any case, it seems to me that MBR partitioning is now obsolete, because the limitations on partition layout imposed by MBR
make it hard to use.
I feel very lonely struggling with this. I have not found anyone else in
my town that I can call on to be a second pair of eyes for this kind of work. There must be a couple of dozen people with the knowledge, but I
don't know them socially, and they are probably as old as myself. And
nobody seems to advertize professional services related to Linux system administration.
Is that true everywhere?
Much of this is due to firewall issues. I have for many years used hand- edited /etc/sysconfig/iptables, but anaconda keeps insisting that I
should be using firewalld, and even though they allegedly use the same backend, the two packages seem to be messing each other up.
| Sysop: | Amessyroom |
|---|---|
| Location: | Fayetteville, NC |
| Users: | 74 |
| Nodes: | 6 (1 / 5) |
| Uptime: | 51:10:09 |
| Calls: | 1,101 |
| Calls today: | 1 |
| Files: | 1,339 |
| Messages: | 276,012 |