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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I see. My concern was with security scanning tools often put on computers by enterprise IT departments but it sounds like that’s not the case here.

    In your situation, assuming you’re not finding what you seek with journalctl, I think I would use a tool like vmstat or sar to collect periodic snapshots of CPU, memory, and io. You can tell it to collect data every X seconds and tee that to a file. After you reboot you can see what happened leading up to the crash. You should be able to import the data into a spreadsheet or something for analysis, but it’s not very intuitive and you’ll need to consult man pages for the options and how to interpret them.

    There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread. I would lean towards a hardware or driver issue, maybe bad RAM. Unfortunately these things take a lot of trial and error to figure out.


  • It may not be the raw RAM usage.

    My first suspect is the Windows VM especially if it’s running enterprise security software 4GB is probably not enough for modem Windows and it could be trying to use its page file, thrashing your disk in the process.

    Are you able to collect some data from system monitor on paging and disk activity? That could help you narrow it down. You can use btop for a quick terminal option if your gui is non responsive (assuming your could switch to a console). Vmstat is another option that you can run in the background to collect stats over time, but it’s not user friendly.


  • It does sound like you may be suffering from depression, but it also sounds like you are receiving treatment. Assuming this isn’t something medical, maybe you need a change of scenery to change your outlook.

    You could travel, as I would have. You could also engage in a hobby (perhaps with friends, new or old). If you’re feeling altruistic, maybe think of something that you wish someone had done for you, when you were in a worse situation. Maybe you know someone who’s down on their luck and you can help them. It doesn’t have to be with money, it can be in other ways. I’ve heard that one way to break out of the depression spiral is to focus your attention outward instead of inward. That would be a way to do it.

    I hope you find your way out of the funk. As bleak as things look, there are still things to be happy about and be grateful for. Don’t let your past prevent you from appreciating the present.


  • If I were in that situation I would buy a shitty flat, pay it off, then spend as little time there as possible while traveling the world. Maybe have some passive income from the flat by renting it out. Not having kids to worry about would make all that a lot simpler.

    But you should do what makes you happy. Try not to worry too much about the future and enjoy what you have now.







  • I vote up if I think it adds value to the discussion or should be seen more. When I down vote it’s because I feel is not adding value or off topic.

    I miss the way Slashdot votes worked, where there are separate counts for each sentiment like agree/disagree, insightful, funny, etc. Maybe reaction emojis are the modern version of that?



    1. Some kind of monitoring software, like the Grafana stack. I like email and Discord notifications.
    2. The Dockerfile will have a HEALTHCHECK statement, but in my experience this is pretty rare. Most of the time I set up a health check in the docker compose file or I extended the Dockerfile and add my own. You sometimes need to add a tool (like curl) to do the health check anyway.
    3. It’s a feature of the container, but the app needs to support some way of signaling “health”, such as through a web API.
    4. It depends on your needs. You can do all of the above. You can do so-called black box monitoring where you’re just monitoring whether your webapp is up or down. Easy. However, for a business you may want to know about problems before they happen, so you add white box monitoring for sub-components (database, services), timing, error counts, etc.

    To add to that: health checks in Docker containers are mostly for self-healing purposes. Think about a system where you have a web app running in many separate containers across some number of nodes. You want to know if one container has become too slow or non-responsive so you can restart it before the rest of the containers are overwhelmed, causing more serious downtime. So, a health check allows Docker to restart the container without manual intervention. You can configure it to give up if it restarts too many times, and then you would have other systems (like a load balancer) to direct traffic away from the failed subsystems.

    It’s useful to remember that containers are “cattle not pets”, so a restart or shutdown of a container is a “business as usual” event and things should continue to run in a distributed system.


  • I speak standing on a hill if my own dead projects. Just remember personal projects are supposed to be fun and educational, maybe with a little resume padding for good measure. Scratch that itch you can’t get to at work. It’s great when other people enjoy them, but as soon as they become a commitment, they start feeling like work. To me, at least.

    That’s why I think games or little tools are great. They small enough so you can throw them out and start over. People won’t get (too) mad if you stop maintaining them (if you open source them) because it’s easy for someone else to take over.



  • They don’t, unless it is sufficiently controlled by medication. A doctor has to sign off that they think you can drive safely. Regulations vary by jurisdiction. Here in Ohio, USA you get a two-part license that says you need a doctor’s permit every time you renew your license to say you can continue to drive. Then you carry a piece of the paper (the second part) with your DL.

    For the doctor (neurologist) to be confident that you aren’t going to have seizure while driving, you have to have been seizure free for some time, plus maybe have regular EEG scans to confirm that you are not susceptible to seizures while being exposed to blinking lights. The blinking lights are part of the EEG scan. You basically hyperventilate (on purpose) while they flash lights at different frequencies and measure your brain waves. If the response is too severe, you fail.

    Like any condition, epilepsy comes in many forms and many levels of severity. Some epileptics can barely function and can have brain damage from too many seizures. Some people have no effects at all as long as they are on medication.


  • True open source products are your best bet. TruNAS and Proxmox are popular options, but you can absolutely set up a vanilla Debian server with Samba and call it a NAS. Back in the old days we just called those “file servers”.

    Most importantly, just keep good backups. If you have to choose between investing in a raid or a primary + backup drive, choose the latter every time. Raid will save you time to recover, but it’s not a backup.