Command line tip of the day

how long since the boss has been asleep so you can finally restart without them calling two seconds later cause they didn't bother reading the scheduled downtime email

Hardware errors often cause system instability hence this is false.

How false are we talking? A couple seconds? Minutes?
- A lot of windows errors are actually hardware acting up. Such as an aggressive overclock or random issues.
  An operating system cannot prevent that

Are we not doing kernel upgrades?

Yeah that’s about the only time I have to do reboots at work which are 99% linux. Well the production ones anyway.
Or the other reason is my lab having power issues due to malfunctioning UPSes, faulty NEMA L6-30 plugs, janky 240v circuit breakers or… I’m beginning to think my lab is electrically cursed.
Was about to say, "or if you're running Arch, the last time you updated the kernel or systemd version, so probably last week or summit."

Pretty sure everybody is missing the joke. The joke is that Debian packages are so stable and stale that you likely will need a reboot before an update.

Also, it's a joke....please patch your boxes, k?

I've got a patch in my boxers right now.
Oh boxes.

I got obsessed with uptime in the early 2000s, but for my desktop Slackware box. It ran a bunch of servers and services and crap but only for me, not heavy loads of public users. Anyway, I reached 6 years of uptime without a UPS and was aiming for 7 when a power outage got me.

Skill issue. Next time you can open up the computers power supply while it’s running, splice in a second power cable, and attach a UPS without powering down or getting electrocuted.
For legal reasons, /s
- Not sure what your signature is supposed to do here but now I have 3rd degree burns and a fireball has engulfed my office wall

How do I check when the last power outage was if it's connected to a UPS?

“Uptime” — aka the anxiety meter for every sysadmin.

That’s ridiculous. It’s much more complicated than that.

You need to check NUT.

Deez? 🌰🐿️

Or if you have a UPS and backup generator or a house battery (do these need a UPS as well still?) it will tell you how long since you setup the system.

I would suspect you would still want a UPS. I don't think house "power" setups have the switch over speed even if they're automatic. Most home generator setups are manual not sure about battery setups.
- My home generator is automatic but you still need an ups because the transfer switch and power on process for the generator isn’t instant. Takes like 10-30 seconds depending on how cold it is and how recently I serviced the generator.
  You also ideally need a higher quality ups that can handle the shitty power coming from a generator, although the overall ups doesn’t need to be as “hefty” as a result. My ups is the kind that has extra filtering and stabilization of incoming power. My old ups was a cheaper cyberpower and it died after a few months of generator usage (we lose power here roughly every 4-6 weeks, thus the auto generator). The cheaper cyberpower would be fine in the majority of home circumstances tbh otherwise.
- Pretty sure batteries can be set up for ups. One of the companies I worked for had part of the power for the building as ups. They used orange outlets to mark them. They constantly had to keep telling people not to overload it.
- Battery should be automatic, but yeah not certain how quick the switchover is. At least you could go for the smallest capacity UPS there is as long as it can manage the wattage you are going with.

On my Gentoo server, uptime:

21:47:56 up 2455 days, 15:09, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00

Solid.

Would have been double that by now if not for the fire.

You forgot to say "this is fine", I take it?
Joking aside, I hope you didn't lose anything. Was it a big fire?
- Those who manage the dedicated server racks service kept my stuff intact. Thankfully. Just disrupted my uptime.
  [User "error" since, has cost me a TB of data. "Error", fearquoted, because it was intentional... probably unnecessary clearing of space, partly regretted since.]
  I don't know how big the fire was, happened over 1000 miles away from here.
  So, it really was fine. :3

step 1: sudo apt install sl

step 2: fuck up

step 3: ???

step 4: profit!!!!

Won't work for me, I am more of a ";l" guy, I have the good direction, but wrong starting point 90%of the time 🥲
Alt+L in fish shell, works great. It runs the ls command without having to modify your current command that you're typing. Or even change your cursor position.
A must have IMO
- Also 'fuck'

Does NixOS apply kernel updates live? I can't recall from when I used it.

Mine doesn't. I reboot when I get a new kernel.

This is why we have UPS ;-)

Seriously, one black out and suddenly you see the need for a UPS. Now my desktop is on a USB, my work laptop and monitors are on a UPS, my homelab is on a UPS, even my modem and router are on a UPS. I just wish I could get a backup generator, but that's not happening anytime soon.
- My experience with using an UPS is that they have caised an outage every few years, which is more often than we get power outages where I live, so I didn't replace the batteries last time the UPS took down my server, and are just running straight from the wall. It might be better with a more expensive UPS, but it's not worth it for me.
- I sometimes have power outage in winter (snow storm, ice, etc) and working from home I need a UPS ; modem cable, router, PC, monitors, are on it, it can stand ~5h
- I got tired of my network puking every time the power went out for 5 seconds.
  Edit- My NAS really dislikes having the power cut off.

At some point when I am less busy again I think I am gonna swap back to a debian based system because my experience on arch and red hat systems just hasnt been as good (this may be because I started on Debian based systems and keep trying to use commands that dont work on the other ones out of muscle memory)

I get bored every so often and move all the important stuff to an external drive or a separate internal one and completely change my os

I am on manjaro but I have also run arch, red hat, void, mint, Debian, Ubuntu and a bunch of others that I either put on laptops or something similar as messing around with devices

Tails and slitaz have to be my favorite to run from a USB but peppermint isn't the worst

I just did the contrary. Moved from debian to arch. After the update to trixie my network stack completely died somehow, so I'm going back to arch.
- I have had minimal issues from my manjaro desktop but I just dont like it as much as my mint based systems because everything feels wrong and I can barely remember how to update my graphics drivers on manjaro vs mint where I am confident I could run my entire system mostly command line from installs to updates and random other shit that I just can't remember how to do through arch systems because I dont run them as hard for some reason

My father was an HPUX admin that had a server with an uptime of >12 years

I was introduced to homelab by trying to figure out how my uncles setup. It ran for 4 years after he died, 11 years uptime. The estate probate prevented anyone from touching the equipment for the legal fights, and I get a kick out of thinking of how smug he would have been about it.

Heard of tuptime? I've been using it for a while now, I think I like it.

System startups: 151 since 18:00:05 10/11/15 System shutdowns: 137 ok + 13 bad System life: 9yr 223d 1h 27m 47s

Longest uptime: 106d 5h 34m 28s from 14:17:10 26/03/22 Average uptime: 23d 4h 32m 0s System uptime: 99.81% = 9yr 216d 12h 31m 51s

Longest downtime: 4d 23h 30m 48s from 10:36:53 14/09/23 Average downtime: 1h 2m 46s System downtime: 0.19% = 6d 12h 55m 56s

Current uptime: 25d 0h 34m 25s since 20:25:37 15/11/25

Heard of it for the first time (as far as I can remember) a couple days ago, on Lemmy.
TIL, Lemmy's educational.
Does it work retrospectively?
- Nope it creates a little database, which you could manualy edit I suppose.
- it doesn't appear to

I have a LXQt on my Termux, running on my android phone, and I am really happy with it (even though I use it for jack shit)

At least in my experience the chances that I move or replace hardware are much higher than the chances for a power outage.

For me I won't be replacing and video cards or ram sticks for the foreseeable future.
- Same... but I also remember a single outage in the last 15 or so years.

So, you never update the kernel?

Mine's not connected to the internet so I'm utilizing the if it ain't broke don't fix it strategy.
@NullPointerException @yesman debian never updates it

Can I ask, what is the advantage of a Debian server over a True Nas one? Asking because I set up True Nas and wondering if I should switch it to Debian

True nas is nas software that moonlights as a server. Debian is a linux distro commonly used as the operating system for servers due to its incredible stability and reliability among other things. So reliable infact that it's used as the operating system for true nas scale! So unless your using the core version (that runs bsd) then your already using it. As far as rawdogging Debian on your hardware goes, id recommend against it unless you're looking to seriously up your admin game. No web interfaces, lots of time in the terminal ( command line ) and more configuration files than is anyway reasonable. And we haven't even started on virtual machines like proxmox ( also Debian based! ) or container critters like docker and kubernetes. (Iirc true nas uses kubernetes under the hood)
- Small correction: since the newest version there only is Trunas Scale, so the Debian derivative, which they now call Community Edition. The BSD variant has been decommissioned as far as I know.
- You seem like the right person to ask this:
  What route do I go if I want to up my admin slowly so I eventually feel able to run pure Debian? Currently running Docker on Unraid with two minor VMs but looking to migrate away from Unraid with the intention to only run FOSS (and get a deeper understanding of everything under the hood).
  I know that's little information, all I need is a nudge in the right direction so I can figure things out by consulting documentation and forums.
Configurability? I mean Truenas Scale is also based on Debian, but it's an appliance software, if you want NAS it's purpose made for that. You need to configure Debian yourself if you want functioning NAS.
I still remember when TN doesn't have native Tailscale apps/docker yet and everytime there's a Truenas update I need to reinstall and set up Tailscale from scratch.
If you just need a NAS with basic apps/docker, there is no reason to just use Truenas.
I use both, but run a Technitium DNS and Frigate on bare Debian.
Debian is well known for maintaining established packages in its repos. This means that all of the software is thoroughly tested, and therefore (usually) stable; however, the software in question is generally older, so it also means that sometimes you'll have to find your own approach if you want to run any newer services.

~~man~~ what's uptime?

I like having a consistent update and reboot schedule. Uptime feels overrated over stability and clearing the RAM occasionally.

I definitely have some Docker containers that randomly stop working, and they are more often consistently fixed by a reboot of the machine rather than a reboot of the container or the Docker service.

Not to mention the security implications of not rebooting after certain updates.
Clearing the ram? For what purpose?

Why type uptime when w is sufficient?

Because in case not wanting the superfluous lines of output.
What the hell!?
- ?

Uptime : up 2 weeks, 5 days, 2 hours, 7 minutes

Had to reboot due to Jellyfin weirdness, It's not happened since so maybe it was patched whatever happened.

They screwed up their upgrade script in the release around then. I spent an hour manually fixing it on my system. I’d imagine they sorted it with a point release shortly after but I haven’t checked.
I had to reboot since i upgraded nvidea and jellyfin stopped transcoding.

Huh. Only 11 days on the Raspberry Pi I'm using as a "desktop system" right now. (Arch Linux Arm, btw... though Arch Linux Arm sucks now-a-days.)

Let's check my RPi-based NAS:

    
[tootsweet@mynasserver ~]$ uptime
 19:56:07 up 212 days, 18:43,  4 users,  load average: 0.16, 0.04, 0.01

Also not as long as I'd have guessed.

My RPi uptime on one project will never exceed 4 hours.
I've got a cron job set to reboot my Raspberry Pi every 4 hours because I wrote a crappy Python app that continuously creates objects during operation that I would have to recreate, but I can't delete the originals, or rather, I can delete the original parent but the child survives and keeps its memory allocation. So a full reboot with autolaunch of the application on boot is my ugly janky workaround. Its a cosmetic application, nothing critical. Its just a colorful display of data metrics.
I can hear the horror and gnashing of teeth of real developers as they read this.
- As a real developer...
  I just remember that airplanes have "reboot the plane every 51 days" to prevent an overflow from crashing the plane in their maintenance manuals
  So, like, yours can be improved, but it's not safety critical like other reboot requirements...
- You just lack imagination. Some hikvision security cameras (the large, very expensive enterprisey ones) restart every couple of days due to "buildup of cosmic radiation".
  No matter how competent you are as a developer, there is no escaping cosmic radiation! 😉
- "If it works, it ain't stupid." ;)

I've got an OpenBSD based router with ~4 hours of battery backup. If I ever stopped futzing around with it, the uptime would be fairly close to when the last version update was. (They've got a release cadence of about 6 months).

Interesting. LMDE seems to be more like MS Windows in that things like kernel updates insist on a reboot, and certain other things are easiest restarted with a reboot too, for example, X.Org changes.

I'm sure there's still a way to bootstrap a new kernel on the bare metal without needing to reboot, likewise for restarting X.Org, but I foresee problems with any programs and daemons that were children of the original processes. For example, convincing them not to exit when their parent does and then getting them to play nice under a new session.

I mean, I guess you could just not update, or have a long period where they're unnecessary and that'd work too. That could well be what this meme is getting at. Can confirm sessions (caveat: with standby and hibernate) that have lasted well over a month.

But this all raises the question: Does anyone actually not reboot when system changes happen, and what's the workflow for bootstrapping without rebooting there?

I don't get why are you talking about LMDE under a meme about Debian
- Because LMDE stands for Linux Mint Debian Edition