Introduction Motivation: I wanted to move a service to another server that is dedicated only to that service. But how much RAM does this new server need? RAM is $$$, so too much is a waste of money, too little means problems. The method is to run the service and expose it to a scenario [...]
Introduction My Debian 8-based web server had been running for several years as an OpenVZ container, when the web host told me that containers are phased out, and it’s time to move on to a KVM. This is an opportunity to upgrade to a newer distribution, most of you would say, but if a machine [...]
The problem I wanted to solve On an embedded arm system running LUbuntu 16.04 LTS (systemd 229), I wanted to add a mount point to the /etc/fstab file, which originally was like this: # UNCONFIGURED FSTAB FOR BASE SYSTEM Empty, except for this message. Is that a bad omen or what? This is the time [...]
The nuisance After trying to fix another problem with Pulseaudio, and messing up a bit with its configuration files, the option to control the volume by virtue of keyboard buttons suddenly stopped to work. The cursor would blink briefly when pressing the button, but nothing else happened. I tried all the fairly normal things, including [...]
Motivation Paid-per-time cloud services. I don’t want to forget one of those running, just to get a fat bill at the end of the month. And if the intended use is short sessions anyhow, make sure that the machine shuts down by itself after a given amount of time. Just make sure that a shutdown [...]
But why? Cronjobs typically consists of a single utility which we’re pretty confident about. Even if it takes quite some time to complete (updatedb, for example), there’s always a simple story, a single task to complete with a known beginning and end. If the task involves a shell script that calls a few utilities, that [...]
Upgrading the kernel should be quick and painless… After upgrading the kernel from v5.3 to 5.7, a lot of systemd services failed (Debian 8), in particular systemd-remount-fs: ● systemd-remount-fs.service – Remount Root and Kernel File Systems Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/systemd-remount-fs.service; static) Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Sun 2020-07-26 15:28:15 IDT; 17min ago Docs: man:systemd-remount-fs.service(8) http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/APIFileSystems Process: [...]
A short one: What to do if unmount is impossible with a # umount /path/to/mount umount: /path/to/mount: target is busy but grepping the output of lsof for the said path yields nothing. In other words, the mount is busy, but no process can be blamed for accessing it (even as a home directory). If this [...]
The problem Using Linux Mint 19, I have a network device that needs DHCP address allocation connected to a USB network dongle. When I plug it in, the device appears, but the DHCP daemon ignored eth2 (the assigned network device name) and didn’t respond to its DHCP discovery packets. But restarting the DHCP server well [...]
There are many ways to ask a Linux machine how it’s doing. I’ve collected a few of them, mostly for my own reference. I guess I’ll add more items as I run across new ones. General Info inxi -Fxxxz (neat output, but makes the system send me security “password required” alert mails because of attempts [...]