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"Arch Linux is actually not that difficult".

I ssh'ed into my home server yesterday.

I was greeted by a message from an ext3 disk about needing fsck. Fine, "I haven't been in here for a while, might as well do some maintenance". fsck /dev/sda6, let's go!

This nicely "repaired" the sshd service (i.e. cleared the sectors), I cursed at myself for pressing enter at "repair (y)" right before the connection broke.

So I connected a display and keyboard... ok so let's just pacman -Sy sshd or whatever. We can do this! Just check the wiki, shouldn't be that hard!

Wait... pacman has not run since 2010? WAIT IT'S ACTUAL UPTIME IS 9 YEARS??? I guess we know why I'm a DB admin and not devops...

Hmm all the mirrors give timeouts? Oh. The i686 processor architecture isn't even supported anymore...?

4 hours, 11 glasses of cognac, 73 Arch32 wiki/forum pages, 2 attempts at compiling glibc, and 4 kernel panics later: "I think I'll buy a new server".

Comments
  • 19
    i686????
  • 27
    @epse That's what 32-bit x86 CPUs were called right before they went extinct. The most famous ones were the first generations of Intel Atom chips. My home server is (was 😂) a glorified NAS with a 48TB ZFS pool of drives. The 32-bit Atom CPU used 5-10w of power, and only needed passive cooling, which is nice for a network drive.
  • 7
    @bittersweet oh shit. The more you know
  • 7
    @bittersweet wait what's the difference between i386 and i686? I though i386 was 32 bit x86?
  • 7
    @bittersweet dude... did you at least add support for tls v1.2?
    Linux can run forever - even after the support is over, and the update servers are gone.
  • 16
    @magicMirror It can run forever, but the hardware doesn't. I was trying to recover broken systemd services using the Arch32 community project mirrors... on a harddrive with a somewhat messed up filesystem and no journaling, eventually it started throwing random kernel panics every time I tried restarting samba...

    So I opted to just get a new 64-bit ITX board which also supports my 48TB raid, and start over with a fresh linux install on an M.2 SSD.

    Sometimes it's just time for new hardware, 9 years of continuous uninterrupted uptime is more than can be expected of any hardware.
  • 8
    @bittersweet makes sense. here hoping for another 9 year of uptime with no problems!
  • 13
    @epse i386 is super old 80s stuff (8086 up till 80386). Then there was a redesigned 80486 (i486), then came 80586 (i586) which most people know as the "Pentium". After that with i686 was all the stuff from PII/PIII up till Yonah/Bonnell/Saltwell (Pentium M and first-gen Atom).

    Pentium 4 & Pentium D was not i686, that architecture was called Netburst, which was quickly replaced by "Core" 64-bit systems. i686 survived for quite long in Pentium M and Atom CPUs though.

    The label i686 is particularly used to label software & operating systems compiled for 32-bit systems without any requirements beyond MMX & SSE(1) instruction sets.
  • 3
    @bittersweet huh I guess some software builds are regularly mislabelled then
  • 3
    @magicMirror

    Some hardware does surprise. I always aim to get the max out of the devices I buy.

    I still have my original Motorola Droid (now running Debian), and my Moto Defy also still functions after soldering a new BGA SoC in it, possibly holding world record for most Android upgrades from Froyo to Lollipop.

    I've also used a 2006 iMac ("the first one with an Intel CPU") as a XMBC/Kodi mediacenter for 12 years, replacing it with a Raspberry Pi last year.
  • 5
    @epse Yeah i686 became synonymous with "All the 32-bit CPUs just before they went extinct".

    So that includes only P4/PD/Bonnell-based Atom/VIA-C7/Atom with >SSE2, even though in that list technically only Atom qualifies as "true" i686, and a "true" i686 Pentium M or Duron/Athlon XP might not run i686 packages.
  • 4
    @gibsonjareds Yup. 9 years ago I was adventurous.
  • 5
    @bittersweet it’s so refreshing to read your rants. You actually take the time to explain things, and share something of substance. Awesome. I know more than I expected to about processor history now.
  • 1
    @hash-table @theKarlisK Yeah there are plenty of options software wise... Debian runs on pretty much any architecture. But the fact that the disk needed a fsck might point to a bad disk, and now I got a new mobo with embedded 64-bit quad core cpu, 4GB ram and an M.2 SSD for €150.
  • 4
    @RantSomeWhere Mine. And yeah, I wouldn't advise it to anyone — but 9 years of uptime means it was at least stable. I used to be a certified Microsoft server admin managing thousands of AD & exchange servers, if someone back then would've told me a server could stay up for a year without a reboot I would have laughed.

    If it's Arch, just never update it, and make sure it's not accessible from the internet 😂
  • 3
    @hash-table Because every time you run pacman -Syu, it's like a roulette game. 95% chance of super fresh bleeding edge updates, 4% chance of cryptic error messages, 1% chance of having to rewrite a config file by hand.
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