Raspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes. In this era you might replace it with a mini-PC (NUC style).
More just that lots of standard images don't bother with tmpfs for logging. So all that IO onto the disk kills them
The death and rebirth of my home server
91–100 of 116 posts
Re: The death and rebirth of my home server
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect most of the "corruption" RPi users experience is likely bad power (shitty undersized USB power bricks) glitching the CPU and causing the filesystem to corrupt. The SD card is likely doing exactly as it's being told by the host system - write (invalid) data to blocks, which it does.
I had more than my fair share of SD failures running pis off their official power supplies. It really is a high failure rate.
"Enterprise" Boot SD's in servers love to die.
More than likely due to being in a warm box...
Re: The death and rebirth of my home server
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect most of the "corruption" RPi users experience is likely bad power (shitty undersized USB power bricks) glitching the CPU and causing the filesystem to corrupt. The SD card is likely doing exactly as it's being told by the host system - write (invalid) data to blocks, which it does.
I've had enough SD and micro-SD cards die on phones and cameras to doubt that is the only problem. People probably see more of a problem on raspberry pis because they write more to the memory than other systems.
Reminds me of years ago, I had to send a load of photos to a client of something I'd travelled 5 hours to photograph.
Didn't even check, just took and sent. Then went back.
Only to find that the SD card in the phone was dying, and every image was corrupted from about 1/3 down...
Re: The death and rebirth of my home server
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work on embedded linux machines that go a decade plus in active use with micro sd cards, it's not a problem at all
It's actually weird that Raspberry Pis seem so bad at using SD cards. I've just scrapped a large PBX which had a whopping 8MB SD card in it. Its 486 processor booted Linux off the SD card, it wrote CDRs to the SD card, it served said CDRs up over a web interface off it, it saved its logs to the card, and all the other day-to-day chatter of a running system. It was installed pretty much 20 years ago. The date sticker…
Because of a properly configured, boot disk. Just boots once per power cycle.
Meanwhile something like the pi, on most images, is writing logs to the storage CONSTANTLY. Not to mention is regularly booted.
Re: The death and rebirth of my home server
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there other computers that run off of SD cards long term successfully that are not Raspberry Pi’s?
We “lost” a signage device in a facility we were doing an IoT refresh on. It was an old wyse terminal, and at some point a CF adapter with an SD card was added, and a construction project buried it inside of a block wall. lol. It’s still there.
Been there before, the amount of times when you're in shared spaces that you come one day to find your kit disconnected, or even outright buried.
We came one day to a plant room where our rack was, to find it was in an entirely different "room", with a locked door....
Re: The death and rebirth of my home server
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Raspberry Pis are notorious for SD card corruption with unknown causes." This is not specific to RPis. When an SD card is subjected to "unpredictable" writes it creates potential risk of corruption. The writes are triggered by software, not the RPi hardware There is no rule that says the RPi user must mount the root filesystem r/w on the card. It can be mounted r/w on mfs or tmpfs, for example, and the card can be r…
And when you say "due to RPi owner behaviour" what you're saying is "due to the default setup". It's a Raspberry Pi problem. The devices are notorious for this issue for good reason.
Default setup is 100% softwareless
Re: The death and rebirth of my home server
#97I'm not a sysadmin but I often hear about server failures due to hardware just wearing out. Is there an expected shelf life of the hardware? I would expect for sure on the storage devices. So if that were the case then why isn't there some sore of daemon or system software service that tracks the expected life of the hardware? I would expect that the software would start showing warnings of imminent useful life of de…
There are plenty of sensors and systems that can "predict" failure and in some cases try and work round them.
Do most people actually use them? Pretty rarely. S.M.A.R.T is just trash anyway.
But you do need to properly design your systems to limit the amount of "use". No un-needed writes to disk etc. Proper ambient detection, no point trying to rush to shut down servers when the AC pops it, and you just so happen to walk into a server room.
Re: The death and rebirth of my home server
#98I'm not a sysadmin but I often hear about server failures due to hardware just wearing out. Is there an expected shelf life of the hardware? I would expect for sure on the storage devices. So if that were the case then why isn't there some sore of daemon or system software service that tracks the expected life of the hardware? I would expect that the software would start showing warnings of imminent useful life of de…
I'm running my own home server on an old 2014 Mac mini, 24/7 basically. It both has a SSD and a HDD (old "Fusion" disk type of machine, but I use both parts separately, the SSD part for the OS, the HDD part for the data.) A few days ago the HDD had its 100,000 Power_On_Hours anniversary. :) According to SMART this is way past the expected/ designed life time of the disk (the normalised value reports "1" since a few y…
Reminds me of the old forum posts where people show off their uptimes.
Uptime is fine, until you restart. And poof
Re: The death and rebirth of my home server
#99> I chose to enable zram for swap swap is used when you run out of ram. using a ramdisk for swap ... You see how that doesnt make sense?
It's more complicated than that, same as PAGING on Windows. It's about offloading some of the less accessed data from RAM onto slower hardware.
You can compress the swap, so you can squezze a bit more by using CPU in that tiny amount of read you do.
Re: The death and rebirth of my home server
#100Lack of proper IO connector is the reason I abandoned Raspi. SD card crashes are nearly a guarantee. Total pita too since there’s no display during the BIOS.
ARM doesn't have BIOS, BIOS is even legacy to pre-x86