linuxmemes

My first Linux machine crashing. This was way before Redhat, Ubuntu, Arch, or OpenSUSE. This was installed from 60+ floppy disks on a 386-40 with 8MB of RAM.

This machine ran happily, but it crashed under heavy load. I checked out causing the load by using different applications, but could not nail it to a certain software. So the next thing I checked was the RAM. Memtest86 ran for a day without any problems. But the crashes still came. So I got the infrared camera from the lab to see if some hardware overheats. Nope, this went nowhere, either.

Then I tested the harddisk. Read test of the whole HD went without problems. I copied the data on a backup medium and did a write and read test by dd'ing /dev/zero over the whole disk, and then dd'ing the disk to /dev/null. Nothing did show up.

I reinstalled the Linux, and it crashed again. But this time, I noticed that something was odd with the harddisk. I added a second swap partition, disabled the first, and the machine ran without problems. Strange...

So I wrote a small program that tested the part of the disk occupied by the old swap space: Write data, read data, and log everything with timestamps. And there was the culprit: There was an area on the HD where I could write any data, but when I read blocks from that area, a) It took a very long time for the read, b) the blocks I read were containing all zero, regardless of what I had written, and worst of all c) there was no error indication whatsoever from the controller or drive. Down at the kernel level, the zeroed blocks were happily served by the HD with an "OK". And the faulty area was right in the middle of the original swap partition.

Fixed a typo in my /etc/fstab that prevented the NAS from mounting. I am a bear of little brain. But I'm also proof that you don't have to be some master hacker to successfully run Linux.

I once broke my Ubuntu install by trying to convert it KDE Neon, that reinstalled half my packages and left it in an basically unusable state. I then un-broke the install while upgrading multiple Ubuntu releases, that reinstalled the other half as well. It actually worked, and I'm still using that install.

my session manager refused to start, and I was very close to reinstalling my system.

So I mostly fried the SSD by using it to write and rewrite ML checkpoints and logs, this in turn made the device read only and I somehow managed to migrate to a different SSD probably using clonezilla or something, but it messed up the bootloader so I installed refind in a new partition, configured it and voila it works. It's scary because you need to do everything without seeing your system even half alive anywhere along the process, but it's not actually hard, just copying data and installing/configuring a bootloader. But for a then 20year old at his more or less first job my head was on fire for the 1.5 days this took.

By far the most difficult single thing that I've ever had to fix that actually had to do with the system.

I now don't flood my SSDs with data that is constantly rewritten.

Grub.

Seriously. Tha was some fat as shit because I didn't know what I was doing.

Around 2017 I spent three days on and off trying to diagnose why my laptop running elementary OS had no wifi support. I reinstalled the wifi drivers and everything countless times. It worked for many days initially then just didn't one day when I got on the laptop. Turns out I had accidentally flipped the wifi toggle switch while it was in my bag. I forgot the laptop had one. Womp womp.

Nvidia driver fucking X in the arse without lube.