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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • I work with IBM i/AS400 servers and those are not exactly the quickest thing to “reboot” (technically an IPL). Especially the old ones. I have access to the HMC/console but even this sometimes takes several minutes (if not dozens) just to show what’s going on.

    It’s always a bit stressful to see the codes passing one after the other and then it stops on one and seems to get stuck there for a while before continuing the IPL process. Maybe it’s applying PTFs (updates) or something, and you just have to wait while even the console is blank.

    I’ve been monitoring those servers for years and I’m still sometimes wondering if it hanged during the IPL or if it’s just doing its thing, because this part, even with codes, is not very verbose.

    Fortunately it’s also very stable so it pretty much always comes back a few minutes after you start wondering why the hell it’s taking so long.





  • Not in rescue mode. If you can’t mount your root partition because something was fudged in /etc/fstab, for example, you may be stuck in recovery and depending on your distribution, it may not have nano in that minimalist mode.

    For me it also happens when I install a VM of Debian using the small image, on my dedicated server in a data center. The company hosting the server requires a special network configuration and AFAIK, there’s only vi. So i need to use the console to access the VM and from there, edit /etc/network/something with vi to setup the network. Once done I can reboot and install the rest of the software over the network, including nano.

    I’ve been using Linux for more than two decades. Before nano I was using pico, but it also required to have pine/alpine installed. So knowing the basics of vi has often been helpful over the years for me.

    Maybe it’s because I like tinkering with VMs and SBCs, and most people will not encounter situations where they don’t have nano, but it can happen. And you’ll be glad to know at least “i” and “:wq!”.







  • Yeah, I usually start hoping I won’t need it but after hitting a few sticky webs I grab a stick and start waving it in front of me. But then I don’t go low enough or do a bad job and catch a few more with my legs or my head. Sometimes I just kind of forget and start using it as a walking stick only to be reminded why I was carrying it in the first place.

    It works, but its effectiveness varies.