+++
title = "Broken system"
author = ["Michał Sapka"]
date = 2024-10-16T22:28:00+02:00
categories = ["blog"]
draft = false
weight = 2003
image_dir = "blog/images"
image_max_width = 600
Abstract = "I am not a smart person"
Listening = "Steve Kirk -  Thimbleweed Park (Original Soundtrack)"
Listening_url = "https://thimbleweedpark.bandcamp.com/album/thimbleweed-park-original-soundtrack"
+++

A very short update: last week I broke my computer. FreeBSD did its best, but my sheer stupidity wouldn't listen.

I updated my ZFS, which worked fine. It informed me info about potentially needing to update my bootloader, but what the hell. I'll have time for it later!

Later was when I forgot about that and rebooted my system. "ReBOOTING" is not the correct word, as it was not booting. FreeBSD was starting, but it could not find any bootable partition. They warned me, but I didn't listen.

After two evenings of trying to fix it (I still think it's possible), I gave up. I downloaded GhostBSD, mounted my ZFS datasets (the problem was not with them, but with booting up), created a small tar backup which I moved to my NAS. Then, making sure I had the backup, I reinstalled the system as fresh.

About that backup, well. For one, I had stuff I didn't want to lose, but I had yet to add any external storage, like git server. Not a smart move on my side. Good thing, that ZFS is designed to be moron-resilient. The other part is that my tar command didn't include dotfiles, and I never bothered to back those as well. My GNUS state is lost, never to be recovered ever again.

But the upside here is that I am much more experienced local-admin than I was when I first moved to FreeBSD. Setup when smooth like butter. Real butter.

I used this occasion to move this site to my server & create the next iteration. I'm still evolving, but backwards. What you are seeing here is, of course, a work in progress.