My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?
OpenSuse Tumbleweed helps because you can create a btrfs snapshot at any moment and then roll back to it if you get in trouble. And it does this automatically whenever you update the packages.
Been looking for a DR system for Ubuntu or mint, need to look into it myself but would like some feedback if this could be the right ticket.
I just bought a raspberry pi 4 to host plex, I’m sure I could get it to do backup and restore too. Looking into it
👍 never had to start over
Making errors and analysing them to figure out what went wrong and why is a huge part of learning. You can only learn so much from theory, some things can be learned best by trial and error and the experience gained from it.
When I started with Linux I did choose to use Gentoo Linux because it was the most complex and complicated option, so I had the most opportunities to learn something by ducking up!
The “starting over” part is what made it take so long for linux to “stick” with me.
Once it became “restore from an earlier image”, it was a game changer!
My game changer was circa 2014 when I broke something and got dropped to a basic shell and for the first time instead of panicking and immediately reinstalling I thought for a moment about what I had just done to break it, and undid the change manually. Wouldn’t you know it booted right up like normal.
The lesson here: if it broke, you probably broke it, and if you know how you broke it, you know how to fix it.
100%
The alternative being variations on:
Hi my name is [redacted], I have [X] years experience.
Please run
sfc /scannow.You can find more help at [Irrelevant KB URL].
Please rank me 5 stars.
Ticket closed
I could be weird for this but the starting over part actually contributed to me continuing to use linux tbh. Trying out a new distro, figuring out how to use it, and building a new user interface each time I killed my system kept me engaged with linux beyond its utility. It functioned essentially as a way to learn about computers and as a creative outlet. I don’t fuck around and find out as much as I used to but I still swap distro every year or so.
It was similar for me, but not quite the same. The thing I hated was starting from scratch. I’m very much not a distro hopper. Back in the day, I enjoyed the challenge of trying to troubleshoot issues and get the system working again, and that kept me interested, but eventually, I’d hit a problem I couldn’t resolve, and I’d have to start again from scratch, and at that point, I’d just go back to Windows.
Now, I still get to do the same thing. If I break it, I get to learn how I broke it and try and fix it, and I find that process compelling. But because I’m using btrfs restore points now, I don’t get to the point where I have to start again from scratch. So I can work at solving it to the limit of my abilities, with confidence that if I can’t work it out, it’s not a huge issue.
Tell me more
Timeshift was a gamechanger
Timeshift itself borked my shit up. I had to reinstall all registered packages to fix its fuckups…
sudo aptitude reinstall '~i'Edit: Sure it took a long while, about as long as a full OS reinstall, but never once was there any issue with the kernel.
While only once, timeshift destroyed my bootloader. Don’t update and reboot before a meeting, kids
My test of Timeshift was pretty simple and straightforward.
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Fresh install Linux Mint
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Install most of the main software I wanted.
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Do a Timeshift backup.
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Install some extra software I didn’t necessarily need, but might want to use someday.
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Restore the backup from step 3.
Results: Everything from step 4 was still registered as installed, but almost nothing from step 4 actually worked.
So I brute force reinstalled everything in place, and haven’t used Timeshift since. I’m perfectly comfortable using the terminal, and at worst a live boot media, to fix any issues that might come up.
Timeshift is a good piece of software doing a tired trick.
The new hotness is copy on write file systems and snapshots. I can snapshot, instantly, then do a system update and revert to the previous snapshot also instantly.
Instead of using symlinks files, like Timeshift, the filesystem is keeping track of things at the block level.
If you update a block it writes a new copy of the block (copy on write). The old copy is still there and will be overwritten unless it is part of a snapshot. Since the block is already written, snapshots don’t require any data to be copied so they’re instant.
Once you finish the system update, all of the overwritten blocks are still there (part of the snapshot) and reverting is also just a filesystem operation, theres no mass data to be copied and so it is also instant.
It does use disk space, as allocated blocks AND snapshotted blocks are stored. It uses less than Timeshift though, since Timeshift copies the entire file when it changes
ZFS and btrfs are the ones to use.
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I also can’t get over the fact that it doesn’t understand RAID or filesystems somehow.
I always think of Kiwi / Ozzie slang when I type chroot.
Of course that’s after consulting the ArchKiwi to remember how to mount it
Ah Chroot bro
Another big part is learning how to set it up in a way that it’s functional and productive the first time and then STOP FUCKING WITH IT.
That also sounds like a good way to stop learning!
Not quite. But sorta, yeah.
Learning to “not fuck with it” or ways to do so and rollback are valid lessons themselves.
Being able to segregate “production” and “development” environments is very valuable.
Being able to segregate “production” and “development” environments is very valuable.
This is a best practice that pretty much everyone, eventually, discovers on their own.
Just did a fresh install after attempting to migrate from a proxmox VM to baremetal (turns out my mobo only supports UEFI and after spending an hr trying to convert I just gave up and reinstalled)
I’m not sure I’ve ever actually killed a system, I’ve booted from UEFI shell manually just to recover systems. Back when I was using arch id just chroot into the system from a flash drive and fix whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is the way!
I started nearly 30 years ago and cannot count the dead systems I have left in my wake. Just on the 2000-ish thing where Dell first offered Linux but it was inherently unstable after booting the pre-written disk image if you touched it, alone… So many kernel sanity failures…
I’m lucky to have only had one system nuked by a faulty power supply that shut down during a kernel update.
I usually just reinstalled back then. But I didn’t get into it till the late nineties. Back when Ian was still on the list serves.
Unless you mean nuking the OS or borking the bootloader. Then yeah, countless.
They died for a reason, for yor growth
True, sacrifices on the altar of the God Sysadmin, and their divine mount Er’orreport
Bricking hardware is a form of enrichment for me.
It do be like that, at least for the first couple years, and typically with decreasing frequency.
I am very happy I am doing this on a ProxMox machine. So fast to flip them up again
I used to have a side system with /home on its own partition precisely to learn different distros and setups. It makes it much easier having a partition which is retained.
These days, qemu is your friend for playing around with random Linux stuff.
i broke debian on my plex server and said fuck it and migrated to endeavor because im more familiar with arch
I’ve been running different versions of Linux since 2011. My crippled kernel count is still zero to this day.
And that’s even after stripping it of the drivers I’ll never need, stripping it of the languages I’ll never need, and even rerouting all temporary files, internet cache, and even core OS log files to tmpfs and ramfs.
Yeah, try troubleshooting an OS with no log files after reboot. Yeah, I can do that, hella performance boost!
Once you break it a few times, you start to understand the value of btrfs or ZFS snapshots.
