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2022

Ubuntu Studio 22.04 on Computer, for a young artist

The young artist in the house, who will soon have an upgraded PC for the new year, will be then running Ubuntu Studio 22.04, made for creative people.

The current system is running Ubuntu Studio 20.04 on a very old system, based on an AMD Phenom II X4 and an Asus M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 from 2010. In preparation for the upcoming upgrade, the process starts by installing Ubuntu Studio 22.04 on a old SSD on my own PC (Rapture), which can later be transplanted to the new PC.

The weirdest corrupted video on an NVidia card

This is the kind of thing that makes you think, this really only happens to me.

Back in June, when the availability and price of graphics card finally approached relatively normal values, I got myself an new ASUS GeForce TUF Gaming RTX 3070 Ti OC Edition (to replace the old ASUS GeForce GTX 1070 STRIX from 2017). It still was still nearly $800 but it was clearly never going to come down to $570 the old one costed back in August 2017.

Then, in September, the new card died. Somewhat surreptitiously...

Undead Yes ─ UnRAID No

My only NAS is my PC. At least, what people would usually do with, or build a NAS for, I just do it with my PC.

Most of my disk storage space is a BTRFS RAID 1 using two 6TB WD BLACK 3.5″ HDD. This setup offers block-level redundancy which is better than the classic device-level redundancy offered by Linux Software RAID or hardware RAID. To keep BTRFS file systems healthy, it is strongly recommended to run a weekly scrub to check everything for consistency. For this, I run the script from crontab every Saturday night (it usually ends around noon the next day).

One Sunday morning, after many successful scrubs, I woke up to both disks failing, each in a different way. But this was not the end of it. And the end of this adventure, disks emerged victorious.

Keeping reading to find out how the disks came back from the dead.

Illustration by Paul Kidby: Zombie leads a small parade of undead citizens with a wooden sign that reads UNDEAD YES - UNPERSON NO

Low-effort homelab server with Ubuntu Server on Intel NUC

Need. More. Server. Need. More. POWER!!!

But only a little bit, maybe just enough to run a Minecraft server, which refuses to start on my Raspberry Pi 4 because it has only a meagre 2 GB of RAM.

I had known about Intel NUC tiny PCs for a while, and how handy they can be to have a dedicated physical PC for experimentation. There was a very real possibility that I would have to set one up as a light gaming PC in the near future, so I thought cutting my teeth on a simpler server setup would be a good way to get acquainted with this hardware platform and its Linux support.