Server work

posted on 08:09 AM on Wednesday 18 December 2019

Had a recurring problem with one of the drives which was finally tracked to failing memory modules. The memory modules were tested and the pair which was failing was removed.

Took the opportunity to install Arch Linux on the server as the old system was corrupted by the memory errors. Arch Linux is really a lot more hands on, requiring configuration for a lot of stuff. The reward is a system which you understand better and is probably faster.

Basically followed the installation instructions on the Arch Linux website which was not too difficult. The base installation when well. For networking I used systemd-networkd which allows me to setup a bridge connection for LXD usage later.

ZFS installation was fine too. I switched to using DKMS version ( https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/zfs-dkms/ ) since it is not tied to the kernal version so ease of system upgrades. Forgot to follow the automatic start section which is really important if you want your datasets to be mounted at boot ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ZFS#Automatic_Start ).

LXD installation was fine and I managed to get the unifi container running by mounting the previous zfs dataset and then doing the following

lxd import zfs_dataset_location

Started the container and it was fine and running well.

So I replaced the zfs image default.img at /var/lib/lxd/disks to mount and import the rest of the containers.

The next container unifi-video was problematic due to the ID mapping which I did not really get until I did a new installation of the container. During the installation, I finally fixed the ID mapping issue with help from https://stgraber.org/2017/06/15/custom-user-mappings-in-lxd-containers/.

So the containers are now happy.

Next was GNOME and that when well initially until I decided to use the Nvidia binary drivers which led to a non-functional GUI. Apparently it was an issue with GDM ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GDM#Wayland_and_the_proprietary_NVIDIA_driver ) so I reverted back to the open source driver and that was fine.

The next issue was that the system went into suspend mode even after I turned it off in GNOME. Fixed it after finding a mention in the GDM docs ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GDM#GDM_auto-suspend_(GNOME_3.28) ).

So the system seems to be fine now.

#computer