Disk Partitioning 2/?

The other reason is mount options. Everything is mounted noatime to reduce disk access. Almost everything gets user_xattr. Some patitions are not mounted automatically: /boot and the cdroms. ordinary users can mount cdroms. Only /usr/and /srv get the dev mount options.

Disk Partitioning 1/?

I have mentioned before that I have opinions on disk partitioning. I have many partitions, usually, more than most people have. There are reasons -- for example, to allow for upgrading hardware, /home is usually separate. Having /usr separate allows me to mount it read […]

New machine 2025 Saga 8/?

I couldn't do it. I could not stand the "modern" "minimilastic" _boring_ login screens with static wallpaper that lightdm gave me. I'll deal when they drag me kicking and screaming to Wayland. For now I have this:

New machine 2025 Saga 7/?

Now we have a barely functional machine. To appease my muscle memory, install

* vim
* emacs-lucid
* zsh
* restore /home and /usr/local from previous machine

Still no GUI.

* lightdm
* fvwm3
* xterm
* nvidia-driver
* linux-headers-6.12.33+deb13-amd64
* […]

New machine 2025 Saga 6/?

Software selection

This is where things get interesting. I am planning on no desktop environments at all. In the netinst installer, unselect everything apart from standard utils. This will be lean mean machine.

Also learned that we now sandbox package downloads using […]

New machine 2025 Saga 5/?

Adding a key file to automatically unlock all the partitions after / and not type in pass phrases

* dd if=/dev/urandom of=/etc/keys/root_keyfile bs=1 count=4096
* cryptsetup luksAddKey /dev/sda3 /etc/keys/root_keyfile
* edit /etc/crypttab adding keyfile column and […]

New machine 2025 Saga 4/?

Cryptsetup fiasco. I have 9 partitions/RAID Arrays/Encrypted volumes. Setting it up in the Debian installer sets up /etc/crypttab with interactive passphrase. Rebooting is /interesting/ since initrd only unlocked / and /usr, dumping me in single user mode with most […]

New machine 2025 Saga 3/?

Tip:

1. The graphical expert mode truncates messages from the installer

2. The installer in the LiveCD image is not quite the same as the netinst installer (the latter has more granular steps).

3. doing disk partitioning by hand is tedious (especially the waiting […]

New machine 2025 Saga 2/?

I have opinions about disk partitioning (I prefer Disk partitions --> software Raid --> Luks encryption -> LVM -> file systems, which is not how the installer does it, so it is expert mode manual installation for me.

I ended up with 9 partitions/RAID arrays/Volume […]

[Travails of failing hardware: A Debian Trixie story 4/4]

## Step 3 Fix up LVM

* pvdisplay -v # do the physical volumes show up?

* vgchanges -aly # Update the volume groups

* vgdisplay -v # are the volumen groups in fstab here?

* lvdisplay -v # What logical volumes do we have?

* fsck -A […]

[Travails of failing hardware: A Debian Trixie story 2/4]

## Step 2 Fix encryption

On rebooting we had / and /usr, but none of the other partitions. There were no /dev/mapp/md?_crypt entries.

* ls /dev/mapper # See what has been opened by cryptsetup

* cat /etc/lvm/backup/home_vg # for […]

[Travails of failing hardware: A Debian Trixie story 2/4]

## Step 1: fix raid

Create a new Trixie live CD image on a USB. Interrupt startup to boot from said USB.

+ mdadm -E --scan | tee /etc/mdadm.conf # Scan for array components

+ mdadm -A -s # Assemble array

+ cryptsetup luksOpen […]

And now one may ssh into ones android phone remotely.

https://gist.github.com/aschober/eeb316027c5037fc3af5fb0327ab44fd