This Will Be Quick

So I had a little time to spare on Sunday evening, and figured I'd set up a DMARC report parser on my home linux box. I quickly ran into some issues with dependencies though, as I hadn't updated the system in a while, so I figured I'd knock that out first.

So I updated all the packages, and for good measure rebooted the system, and... it didn't boot.

Uh oh.

I wandered over to the computer to have a peek at it, and I saw that it was stuck in the initrd phase of booting, complaining that it couldn't find the root filesystem. Trying to mount the root fs just resulted in some unhelpful "invalid argument" errors and, after bashing my head against that for a while, I decided that whatever was broken I wasn't going to fix, and that I should just finally get an SSD to put the root partition on rather than trying to deal with the md raid.

4TB should last me a while, I think. It's a good thing these are cheap, and it's a good thing that Jeff Bezos delivers these things quick.

Anyway, step one is installing this beast. This is a fairly modern case, so on the front side everything is very clean and well organized.

But that's only because the horrifying mess gets hidden on the back.

But that side of the case isn't transparent, so out of sight, out of mind.

So, with that installed we'll boot off of a live Debian image and copy everything over.

It's about 2.8TB in total, but a lot of that will get moved back to the RAID once I'm done reorganizing things.

The copy took about 6 hours to complete, which is actually a bit faster than I thought it would go.

From there it was just a simple matter of installing Grub and booting the system. Or it would have been a simple matter if I'd remembered to make an EFI partition, or if I'd remembered to actually configure Grub, or if I had had the sense to boot back into the live Debian image to configure Grub instead of stubbornly trying to get it to boot manually for an hour or so.

Anyway, I did eventually get things back up and running, and I must say it'd much more spritely now that it's not waiting on the latency of the spinny drives.

I still need to move some stuff back to the RAID though; for now that'll mostly be my security cam recording directories, but I'd also like to put some Time Machine shares there... once I figure out how to fix the Time Machine shares to actually work. Always something...