f-log

And HAPPY NEW YEAR!

A quick look back at last year in flog land.

Flog the year of 2020

number of posts 53

total tags 2041

of which were used in 2022 374

of which were new in 2022 145

Top tags 14 flog.xml 10 update.xml 10 blender.xml 8 3dprinting.xml 6 film.xml

I switched from text edited BBcode styled flog posts to markdown in March.

Here are some graphs depicting the number of posts, length of posts and number of images in posts.

To run the gnuplot scripts from last year I found I could

gnuplot -e "set terminal png; set output $OUTPUTFN" $PLOTSCRIPT

in a loop of $PLOTSCRIPT files to $OUTPUTFN pngs

Because I had to many posts in November the legend/key got stuck behind the bar graph. The fix was to add.

set key outside

to the plot script.

Or delve into the Updated Archive (20 years of flog)

I have a little problem. Every time I run an update and try download a load of mail my machine slows down.

I saw it a while ago and checked the basics. What was running in the background, disk usage, memory usage etc.

Then it started getting worse. Doing anything with the disk would cause stutters. I figured I had selected a non-optimal kernel scheduling option.

I started being very careful to only run updates when nothing else was running, but accidentally checked on my mail :(

The machine slowed down until after a few hours I had no choice but to reboot. Something was not right, but having never experienced a bad drive in 20+ years and Linux running fsck to fix any slight problem...

I checked the smart stats on the drive and everything was A-OK!

Phew!

I ran the update on its own. The thinking being that if I get up to date I can do a "good" backup. Remember Gentoo recompiles everything from source, so there is a lot of disk activity for an update.

The fates were not kind. This time the machine hung and refused to boot up again !!

First thing was a forensic copy of the drive using dd using a live Gentoo USB. This created a block for block copy of the entire drive.

It took +3hrs and the KDE screen lock on the live USB locked up. I left it over night and it did make the backup.

Phew!

Then I mounted the drive and did a tar backup of the files. Another +3hrs

More detailed investigation in to the smart data on the drive. All A-OK!

So I wiped the drive and restored from my dd block by block backup.

It wouldn't boot :(

I set about recreating the drive partitions from scratch and after quite sometime following the Gentoo install handbook had a drive with all the correct partitions and recovered data from the tar file backup.

It booted and all seemed perfect until it died :(

No idea what is wrong with the drive, it was only 3 years old :(

Luckily I had another SSD and with my new found knowledge was able to build from scratch and copy over my files. Nothing lost.

My new years resolution is probably to make more back ups :D