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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Nice, I’ll post mine as a reply since it’s very similar :)

    Work: when I started we were Centos/RHEL with some Debian, then pivoted to primarily Debian, now we have pivoted to Ubuntu.

    Work Desktop: Besides obligatory Windows I have been on Gentoo +KDE for the last 10 years, but the Chromium portage build times as well as some weird performance degradation finally became too much and I just recently switched to NixOS (with newer hardware).

    Home Server: Slackware/Gentoo for a while starting in the mid 2000’s, then stuck with FreeBSD for over a decade. Since then I’ve just happy with Raspian on an rpi, but looking at switching it to NixOS

    Home Desktop: Wasn’t much of a category for me and usually just a Windows junkie at home, but recently been very pleased with SteamOS









  • So if you want to use systemd-boot as the bootloader you have to (apparently) install the systemd-utils package. Or you can just use GRUB / efistub.

    Edit: looks like groche beat me to it 😁

    It’s probably been 4 years since I last had to rebuild my Gentoo, but I would be very surprised if there weren’t good OpenRC instructions. I built mine with systemd and Gentoo handbook instructions always felt like ‘Are you sure you don’t want to use OpenRC? Ok, here are the systemd steps I guess’



  • But how to get the OS to recognize it?

    My approach for doing this in Gentoo with an encrypted /home is to configure dracut to make a slightly customized initrd.

    Thanks to dracut modules, not too much configuration is needed - it prompts on boot for the password to decrypt, and then fstab is just configured to mount the decrypted uuid.

    Someone else mentioned using multiple key slots, but I think this is your only real secure option.

    Edit: on second thought, you may be able to get this to work in grub simply by adding rd.luks.uuid=xxx as a kernel boot parameter, and then having the decrypted /dev/mapper uuid in fstab for /home


  • A few decades ago I bought a used IBM as a *nix server, but it would lock up at nearly random intervals like you describe. Tried a different Linux distro… same issues. Tried BSD - same issues!

    It wasn’t until after I learned of the 1999-2007 capacitor plague that I inspected the motherboard and saw that yes, several of the capacitories were bulging.

    https://www.robotroom.com/Faulty-Capacitors-1.html

    I mailed the motherboard to a servicer who replaced all the capacitors for a nominal fee. After that it was a rock solid system. You mention that this is recent hardware, but I would still suggest taking a peek at those caps.






  • I’m using Gentoo with systemd and a customized kernel, and additionally I have the /usr partition LUKS encrypted. Because /usr is absolutely essential for systemd to function, I configured dracut to make a specially crafted initrd which activates the luks lvm and prompts for the password to decrypt and mount /usr on startup before systemd init tries to run.

    About a year or two ago, some update to dracut or some other dependency (assumption) caused the dracut generated initrd’s to kernel panic. After multiple days of troubleshooting, I discovered that just copying forward an older initrd in /boot and naming it to match the new kernel, e.g. initramfs-6.6.38-gentoo.img , allows the system to boot normally .

    So, my Gentoo is booting a kernel 6.6.something with a ramdisk generated in the 5.9 kernel era. I am dreading the day when this behavior breaks and I can no longer update my kernel 😳