Power outage now my server asks for fck, what to do?

[Robert Heller]

At Wed, 06 Jan 2021 15:34:07 +0100 bo.berglund at gmail.com, "Ubuntu user technical support,  not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 
> On Mon,  4 Jan 2021 11:29:23 -0500 (EST), Robert Heller
> <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:
> 
> >e[234]fs seems to be a generally fairly robust file system.
> 
> Mine is ext4, is that what you refer to?

Yes.

> 
> It did repair using fsck, although I had to hook up a physical VGA
> monitor and a keyboard to be able to get to the on-boot dialog.
> 
> >The OP should consider getting a UPS (at least) and possibly think about 
> >implement a software RAID mirror set.  With a good UPS and the proper UPS 
> >deamon software, the system should be able to manage a clean shutdown in the 
> >event of a power failure.
> 
> I thought of the UPS and located a few candidates in on-line stores,
> but when I examined these it looked like they were not in stock and
> then going further to the manufacturer they were discontinued
> products....
> So I was left with no decently sized/priced product to use...
> 
> I have a related question:
> 
> My *server* (no GUI installed) is running on an eMachine E1352 mini
> tower with an AMD CPU, which is quite old (from 2010)...
> 
> Is there a way to move the system over to a newer hardware platform
> without creating everything from scratch?
> 
> Can I just insert the disk in another PC and start it up and it will
> find the things that need modification?

Generally yes.  Linux is very flexible that way.  The main issues will be 
device driver issues.  For a server without the GUI, this is going to be 
minimual.  For the most part disk interfaces are very standardized and/or auto 
detected at boot time.  The main thing that might bite you is UEFI.  If your 
old machine is NOT UEFI and your new is UEFI, you might have problems booting 
up -- if you can select legacy BIOS mode, you will be able to boot right up.

I have been doing this since the 1990s.  Either replacing motherboards, 
upgrading disks (disk-to-disk copies) and/or upgrading the whole chassis (disk 
transplant). I've swapped disks in both laptops and desktop machines.  The 
only issues have been migrating from 32-bit to 64-bit and migrating from SCSI 
disks to SATA disks.  These have been the only "fresh installs", as well as 
major O/S version updates.  I've always kept my "data" on separate file 
systems from my O/S (root) FS.  Oh and migration from ext2 to ext3 to ext4.

> 
> Or do I have to somehow re-create the entire installation on new
> hardware? Or is there some middle way?
> 
> I can see these issues:
> - CPU does not match (do I have to get a PC with AMD CPU?)

Pretty much all x86_64 processors are interchangable (the kernel will figure 
out any variations (eg # of cores, etc.) when it starts).

> - BIOS does not match (probably not an issue)

Only BIOS vs UEFI

> - Network adapter MAC address does not match (should only affect 
>   the IP it gets by DHCP, right?

Yes.

> - Disk not recognized (I think an ext4 drive would be OK)

Should not be a problem.

> 
> This is what I run on the server:
> - OpenVPN server
> - Apache webserver with https certs handled by certbot
> - Subversion server with a 15 GB repository
> - Video server (mini-dlna) for video streaming locally
> - more I have forgotten now
> 
> 
> 

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