Subj : Re: Failure to communicate
To   : Spectre
From : Zip
Date : Wed Aug 24 2022 00:05:09

Hello Spectre!

On 24 Aug 2022, Spectre said the following...
 Sp> By the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes...namely HD
 Sp> failure....

:-O

 Sp> pages for the most part.  Still no idea what's happened to CRON.

Are there any logs from the MTA (Postfix, Exim etc.)?
Or perhaps frozen messages in the outbound mail queue for some reason?

 Sp> Something I did discover though, probably not related but perhaps so, is
 Sp> a raft of SMART errors. A mixture of deferred writes, lock outs and more

Ah, yes, this usually comes with time...

In the old days I lost almost 10% to bad sectors overnight on an old Seagate 428 MB HDD. Not sure if that one had SMART reporting, although back then I don't think neither the OS nor the BIOS checked the SMART status...

I have installed smartd here, which e-mails about any errors. If e-mail is working, that is...

Aside from continuous (every 30 minutes) monitoring of the SMART status, I have configured it to do a short daily self-test of all drives. For non-SSDs, on the 1st each month, it does a long self-test instead of a short one.

Hopefully that will give some in-advance indication of any drive problems...

 Sp> some ~9 years old.  Time to back up whatever appears to be important,
 Sp> and see about replacing it, and install a new system on it.

Yep! =)

Best regards
Zip

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