My Sunday Morning until afternoon. FML. So I was experiencing nightly reboots of my home server for three days now. Always at 3:12am strange thing. Sunday morning (10am ca) I thought I'd investigate because the reboots affected my backups as well. All the logs and the security mails said was that some processes received signal 11. Strange. Checked the periodics tasks and executed every task manually. Nothing special. Strange. Checked smart status for all disks. Two disks where having CRC errors. Not many but a couple. Oh well. Changing sata cables again 🙄. But those CRC errors cannot be the reason for the reboots at precisely the same time each night. I noticed that all my zpools got scrubbed except my root-pool which hasn't been scrubbed since the error first occured. Well, let's do it by hand: zpool scrub zroot....Freeze. dafuq. Walked over to the server and resetted. Waited 10 minutes. System not up yet. Fuuu...that was when I first guessed that Sunday won't be that sunny after all. Connected monitor. Reset. Black screen?!?! Disconnected all disks aso. Reset. Black screen. Oh c'moooon! CMOS reset. Black screen. Sigh. CMOS reset with a 5 minute battery removal. And new sata cable just in cable. Yes, boots again. Mood lightened... Now the system segfaults when importing zroot. Good damnit. Pulled out the FreeBSD bootstick. zpool import -R /tmp zroot...segfault. reboot. Read-only zroot import. Manually triggering checksum test with the zdb command. "Invalid blckptr type". Deep breath now. Destroyed pool, recreated it. Zfs send/recv from backup. Some more config. Reboot. Boots yeah ... Doesn't find files??? Reboot. Other error? Undefined symbols???? Now I need another coffee. Maybe I did something wrong during recovery? Not very likely but let's do it again...recover-recover. different but same horrible errors. What in the name...? Pulled out a really old disk. Put it in, boots fine. So it must be the disks. Walked around the house and searched for some new disks for a new 2 disk zfs root mirror to replace the obviously broken disks. Found some new ones even. Recovery boot, minimal FreeBSD Install for bootloader aso. Deleted and recreated zroot, zfs send/recv from backup. Set bootfs attribute, reboot........
It works again. Fuckit, now it is 6pm, I still haven't showered. Put both disks through extensive tests and checked every single block. These disks aren't faulty. But for some reason they froze my system in a way so that I had to reset my BIOS and they had really low level data errors....? I Wonder if those disks have a firmware problem? So that was most of my Sunday. Nice, isn't it? But hey: calm sea won't make a good sailor, right?

tl;dr:
The Debian 10 live disc and installer say: Heavens me, just look at the time! I’m late for my <segmentation fault

—————

tl:
The Debian 10 live cd and its new “calamares” installer are both complete crap. I’ve never had any issues with installing Debian prior to this, save with getting WiFi to work (as expected). But this version? Ugh. Here are the things I’ve run into:

Unknown root password; easy enough to get around as there is no user password; still annoying after the 10th time.

Also, the login screen doesn’t work off-disc because it won’t accept a blank password, so don’t idle or you’ll get locked out.

The lock screen is overzealous and hard-locks the computer after awhile; not even the magic kernel keys work!

The live disc doesn’t have many standard utilities, or a graphical partition editor. Thankfully I’m comfortable with fdisk.

The graphical installer (calamares) randomly segfaults, even from innocuous things like clicking [change partition] when you don’t have a partition selected. Derp.

It also randomly segfaults while writing partitions to disk — usually on the second partition.

It strangely seems less likely to segfault if the partitions are already there, even if it needs to “reformat” (recreate) them.

It also defaults to using MBR instead of GPT for the partition table, despite the tooltip telling you that MBR is deprecated and limited, and that GPT is recommended for new systems. You cannot change this without doing the partitions manually.

If you do the partitions manually and it can’t figure out where to install things, it just crashes. This is great because you can’t tell it where to install things, and specifying mount points like /boot, /, and /home don’t seem to be enough.

It also tries installing 32bit grub instead of 64bit, causing the grub installer to fail.

If you tell it to install grub on /boot, it complains when that partition isn’t encrypted — fair — but if you tell it to encrypt /boot like it wants you to, it then tries installing grub on the encrypted partition it just created, apparently without decrypting it, so that obviously fails — specific error: cannot read file system.

On the rare chance that everything else goes correctly, the install process can still segfault.

The log does include entries for errors, but doesn’t include an error message. Literally: “ERROR: Installation failed:” and the log ends. Helpful!

If the installer doesn’t segfault and the install process manages to complete, the resulting install might not even boot, even when installed without any drive encryption. Why? My guess is it never bothered to install Grub, or put it in the wrong place, or didn’t mark it as bootable, or who knows what.

Even when using the live disc that includes non-free firmware (including Ath9k) it still cannot detect my wlan card (that uses Ath9k).

I’ve attempted to install thirty plus times now, and only managed to get a working install once — where I neglected to include the Ath9k firmware.

I’m now trying the cli-only installer option instead of the live session; it seems to behave at least. I’m just terrified that the resulting install will be just as unstable as the live session.

All of this to copy the contents of my encrypted disks over so I can use them on a different system. =/

I haven’t decided which I’m going with next, but likely Arch, Void, or Gentoo. I’d go with Qubes if I had more time to experiment.

But in all seriousness, the Debian devs need some serious help. I would be embarrassed if I released this quality of hot garbage.

(This same system ran both Debian 8 and 9 flawlessly for years)

For the last week or so I've been writing a userbot for Telegram. Completely from scratch, plus Telethon to not reinvent the wheel entirely. I'm coming from the codebase of an existing userbot.

That userbot is written by a good friend of mine, who makes 6 figures, and whom I respect greatly. However the code is a steaming pile of shit. Now that is not his fault, he largely inherited that code too, tried to fix it, failed, gave up.

I am reimplementing it entirely. I'm only looking at the modules, trying to understand them, and copying over the necessary bits and changing them where necessary. But I've come across some nasty shit.

Userbots often edit existing messages from real Telegram clients. They're kind of like a login to your account, but with a program rather than a regular client. You send a message from a real client, it sees it and does whatever it needs to, and edits your message to give you feedback. Which is great.

However, there's no need to do simple string edits by importing "re". So why do you? Because you're an idiot, that's why. The old bot is based on Paperplane, which in turn is based on Telethon. Why do I see function calls to Telethon in some places and Paperplane in others? Because you're an idiot, that's why. Why does the dig module fail to even give correct answers? Because you know nothing about the DNS, that's why. And you didn't learn about RRs before implementing it.

And don't you tell me that this code is shit, and this bot is slow only when I run it on a fucking Pentium. I run this shit on an i7 and CPU isn't even the issue - memory, disk and such are. If you had any clue whatsoever about efficiency, you would've known because it's blatantly obvious. There's a reason why my machines rarely go past 5% CPU utilization. It's the fastest component in the entire fucking system.

When users come and say.. hmm this application of yours, it consumes a lot of memory. It takes a long time to do X and Y and I don't quite understand why, it seems illogical. Then maybe you should go look at your code, like you would look at yourself in the mirror. And then you fucking go fix it so that I don't have to. You're an engineer just like I am. And I am not even a dev proper - I'm a sysadmin by trade. Why should I have to fix your shit for you?

I had a 1Tb external hard drive on the corner of desk (My fault, i know, but at that time i didn't have a lot of space), i used it to keep mostly unimportant things like game files, VMs, movies and stuff like that. Once i was streaming a movie from the pc to the tv in the other room, suddently the tv disconnected, i went to the pc room to check, and i found out that the evil monster that lived in my house (the cat) dropped it off the desk.
The hard disk died and brought all its files with it, luckly i had backups for most of the important files, but i had to download again around 300GB of stuff.... with my slow internet.

Can I say Ubuntu installation has really gone messy lately(at least the last time when I installed back in 2009). Especially the part of disk partition and selection. You get only three options - Install alongside Windows(without additional customisation), Install on the whole disk, and then Custom.

Most times these days people will select Custom and configure the partitions. And then the crucial part is selection of Boot Loader. But it's not given much focus which is empirical because otherwise even if your installation is successful, without the correct Bootloader config, you will continue to boot into Windows and then debugging and fixing gets really tricky. Especially for somebody who wants to try it out.

And then you will be cursing yourself to have bought a laptop with Nvidia graphics card because the drivers are proprietary and sometimes they have you stuck in Blank Screens prior to login. Ubuntu is not at fault here, but then it makes the life of people trying out things so much more difficult that will force people to just give it up.

I had moved to CentOS(because of Gnome) back in 2015 after really squeezing everything out of Ubuntu 9.04 on my Intel Core 2 Quad. And today, I installed Ubuntu 20.04 after almost 11+ years and it was really not a good experience.

Currently trying to make a multi boot machine, with a lot of linux distros inside, like debian, fedora, gentoo and arch.

I know I will have to format everything a lot of time, because of stupid mistakes, I want to try to put /home in common, and play with some more SSD, and to put a preempt_rt patched kernel somewhere.

I am starting from debian,
Format counter: 3

Reason 0: because i need to install at least once...
Reason 1: I am stupid
Reason 2: I disconnected the SSD,to connect a disk with windows. Now bootloader doesn't find any os in the SSD anymore... still no clue, and in case of doubt: give windows the fault 😠😠😠

DAMN YOU WINDOWS, how did you find that I want to use debian? What did you do to break it?? (Despite it wasn't even connected?!?)

I have checked everything about secure boot, and I am sure it is disabled...

And every search online gives results about dual boot, but it is not my case... :/

Error: Disk image full.
...
Not good on a production SMB server. Wasted 2 hours tracking the fault down....

Turns out the boss thought it would be a good idea to install syncing software as remote backup without telling anyone...

It wasn't remote :(

My collegue make remote assistance for our software, dedicated to doctors in Italy. A doctor had the hd completely full, so it can't update the software and he call my collegue angry, saying "i've an update error, is your fault!!!" etc...after my collegue explain him he had to free space on the disk because there is no space, he had a genial idea! he brought new laptop, worst than the other one, because of the free space on disk!