This is all I’ve run across on reverse engineering, so far but it is quite interesting.

https://bsky.app/profile/filippo.abyssdomain.expert/post/3kowjkx2njy2b

Totally agree. Have been there and done that quite a few times too.

Hopefully people with more of a clue than me will chime in… Meanwhile, my best swag is the filesystem had issues and had to do an fsck? If that’s the case it would boot quickly next time assuming a clean shutdown.

Were there any errors during boot?

Fastboot enabled in BIOS or no? (Not sure if this has anything to do with anything I’m just trying to look useful)

PS: the weird active time could maybe somehow be related to the filesystem being borked needing fsck? I’m not sure.

Load average of 400???

You could install systat (or similar) and use output from sar to watch for thresholds and reboot if exceeded.

The upside of doing this is you may also be able to narrow down what is going on, exactly, when this happens, since sar records stats for CPU, memory, disk etc. So you can go back after the fact and you might be able to see if it is just a CPU thing or more than that. (Unless the problem happens instantly rather than gradually increasing).

PS: rather than using cron, you could run a script as a daemon that runs sar at 1 sec intervals.

Another thought is some kind of external watchdog. Curl webpage on server, if delay too long power cycle with smart home outlet? Idk. Just throwing crazy ideas out there.

Not op. I installed windows 10 on my custom built desktop and my kids custom built desktop, on VM, etc. Have not had a problem and it was pretty simple overall. I’m sure some folks do have issues, though. Shit happens. Is windows 11 shittier for install? I’ve never had the desire to try :)

I’ve also installed various Linux distros on the above and a few other computers (Mint, Nobara, Fedora). Aside from Mint not working with my AMD RX 6600, no problems there either, really. And these distros installed easily.

Again, ymmv. I knew Mint would probably fail because the 5.19 kernel does not seem to like my GPU. That’s why I switched to Nobara in the first place (iirc the 6.x kernel wasn’t available at the time)

Good to know. Well I have 16G now that should give me plenty to spare.

I will have to try that once my ram upgrade gets here.

Well, you’re not wrong. I was away from my desktop when I commented and forgot btop looked so fancy.

For now I still prefer htop because I can see at a glance the stuff I’m most interested in (mem & cpu and process sort).

I’ll have to play with some of the other suggestions in the post…

I also am starting to play around with cockpit a little more for remote monitoring.

If I was that memory- and cpu-constrained I would be using other tools such as memstat, iostat, and cpustat.

htop because pretty colors and graphs.

Or top because it’s like muscle memory now.

Jesus that sucks so much. It looks like you have a solution for now but I bet there are some folks here and elsewhere who would be all in on reverse engineering the shit out of any part of that system.

That’s a paddlin anti-trust forced breakup!

The hero we need! Ty!

I’m not entirely sure why but Calibri has always mildly annoyed me. Maybe because it was the new default at one point and I preferred something else. Or maybe because I felt that the default font size should be 10 or 12 points not…11 (pffft huff) Maybe it was just misplaced resentment for having to use Office products (at work). The new one has kind of a fun look, though. Maybe I will enjoy it.

Anything to make a buck.

I have a couple Lenovo tiny form factors: an M700 8GB w/ J3710 running Pihole on Ubuntu server—which is total overkill in both CPU and mem; and an M73, 4GB w/4th gen i3 running jellyfin server on Mint 21.3. Certain kinds of transcoding brings it to its knees but for most 1080p streaming it’s fine. Memory is a bit tight; 8G would be better. It has a usb3 2T drive for video files that runs more than quick enough. Serial adapters are available if you want to use the console.

The latter has been running for I think a couple years. The former I just set up.

But I’ve been shopping for newer gear for the Jellyfin server. I think you could get a Dell, HP, or Lenovo 6th gen TFF with 8G and 256-512G internal SSD within your price range.

I see some EliteDesk G800 G3 (6th gen Intel) tinys with no disk for $50-70 shipped on eBay in the US. I think those look the coolest by far :)

You could find one with no disk, no ram and config as you please and probably still come in under budget.

E-

My eventual plan for the Jellyfin server is a SFF, probably an HP with enough space to fit a couple of big HDDs, plus 16G ram and a newer CPU that can transcode on the fly without lag.

Yes, Xitter, I xit you not!

Or use the id command.

FWIW it is doable :) since I have Fedora (37) and a separate /home and / device. Btrfs in my case.

How did you deal with the home sub volume?

I will edit this with hopefully useful info about my fstab etc. in a few min…

— okey dokey —

Here’s my fstab. I had to comment out the home subvol and mount /home

UUID=02b32afc-3e05-412b-8781-xxx /                       btrfs   subvol=root,compress=zstd:1 0 0
UUID=e82e80a8-b169-4127-90ad-xxx /boot                   ext4    defaults        1 2
UUID=D358-0ADF          /boot/efi               vfat    umask=0077,shortname=winnt 0 2
#UUID=02b32afc-3e05-412b-8781-xxx /home                   btrfs   subvol=home,compress=zstd:1 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/7b194608-a407-4c2c-a0d8-xxx /home auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0

Permissions on /home mount point (before mounting device to mountpoint):

$ ls -la /home
total 0
drwxr-xr-x. 1 root root   0 Jan  5 20:47 .
dr-xr-xr-x. 1 root root 166 Feb 27 18:36 ..

$ sudo getfacl home
# file: home
# owner: root
# group: root
user::rwx
group::r-x
other::r-x

Relevant output from df

$ df
Filesystem      1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb3       998540288   5447260 991484436   1% /
/dev/nvme0n1p6 1248619684 932769256 258218276  79% /home

Home dir permissions

$ ls -ldZ /home/mes
drwxr-xr-x. 196 mes mes system_u:object_r:user_home_dir_t:s0 12288 Feb 27 19:13 /home/mes

$ sudo getfacl /home/mes
getfacl: Removing leading '/' from absolute path names
# file: home/mes
# owner: mes
# group: mes
user::rwx
group::r-x
other::r-x

Let me know if I can give any additional info.

Our district bans them in middle school and leaves policy to each teacher in HS.

Maybe they should ban phones at work too lol

I have been checking the thrift stores for DVDs and blu rays lately with a plan to drop one or more streaming services. I’m afraid to tally up how much we pay a month for all that crap.