Chris Bognar

I haven't done much work outside of shell scripting and config files, and I'm not experienced enough to work inside the systemd framework for fear of trashing the system beyond my knowledge. I've been reading the bash guide TRS-80 offered as a reference, and I've come away with a better understanding of some of the more complex ideas, but I've been browsing it for 3 days and still have quite a bit to read and absorb. Many thanks for his advice and fast replies. Here is a cleaned up, easier to read version of my original script . . . I haven't modified it operationally because it works like I need it to, but hopefully my style will improve as I get more involved with it. Also thanks to gprovost for his quick replies and exceptional help to the community as a whole. This is truly a fantastic machine and labor of love for the KOBOL team.

If anyone is interested, I've created a shell script that can be run with cron to check A/C and battery status, and do a graceful shutdown when a battery threshold is met. It also logs power outages, battery drain when off A/C, and when it posts a shutdown (if any). This is a simple script, nothing fancy, but works for me. It has a granularity of one minute (cron is limited to one minute intervals), but I've been able to keep the system up on heavy load for 4-5 minutes before the script generates a shutdown on low battery. The script is generous -- it waits for 916mV or less before a shut-down. This value was provided by the KOBOL team on their Wiki as the recommended shutdown threshold for the battery, but can be changed via the script. You can comment out any file-logging lines, or change the file location, also from within the script. I've heavily commented it, should be pretty easy to follow. Copy the script below into a file named whatever you choose, place it where you want to run it, and cron it to get it going. It should only create disk writes when the power is out or when shutting down from battery drain on no A/C (a few lines once per minute), and will create no disk writes if you comment out the logging. Let me know how it works for you, if you use it. I've been testing it for the past couple of days, and it's worked as intended. I'm always open to code tips, and I'm still learning, so any advice is appreciated.

I figured out my issue. I set up a 4GB swap partition on the spare drive, and the system was choking on it. To fix my problem, all I had to do was turn off the swap and remove the swap partition mount from fstab and all was good. As I said, I'm just a hobbyist, and I set up the swap drive out of habit with linux. The system works fine without it, but I'd be interested in learning why it was Oops-ing on a swap partition. If I find the answer, I'll post it here for others to learn from.

Getting system crashes and instability, including a loss of HD I/O, during very large file transfers. This happens over the network, whether using SCP, FTP, or SMB. I'm a hobbyist, and am no coder or developer, so other than Googling, I have no practical knowledge to pull on. When the problem started occuring, I opened two PuTTY SSH interfaces as root - one with htop, and another with "dmesg --follow" to see what was going on with the system, and this is what happened: dmesg readout at file transfer crash (using SMB this time): Terminal lost connectivity at this time. On the PuTTY htop session: CPU frozen, a few cores max, temp in the high 50's (58 on crash). Terminal lost connectivity at this time also. When this happens, if the system is able to continue, no more HD activity is able to occur. If the KOBOL softlocks, I have to hard powerdown (hold the power button until it turns off). I'm running 4 HD's in a RAID5, through OpenMediaVault, and one manually mounted HD as a spare drive. The RAID5 is XFS, the spare drive is EXT4. The RAID5 drives are NAS drives, not all the same though, and the spare drive is an old desktop drive. Any ideas or help would be appreciated . . . Google's results are varied and inconclusive so far.