Raspberry down and out for the count

My Raspberry Pi based hosting came to an abrupt end earlier this week as the RPi3 suddenly became unresponsive. Powering off and on the device resulted in an infinitive loop of I/O error messages. I’ve tried to recover the filesystem, but unfortunately my attempts proved to be unsuccessful.

Deploying and configuring another Slackware ARM based server is not a project I want to undertake at the moment (due to the time and effort it requires) so I opted to move my site to a cloud based provider.

Even though I had my site and configuration files backed up, any deployment including HPKP, HSTS and CSP will be a somewhat tedious affair. Good thing I had my keys and certificates stored offline or else we would be facing the dark side of HPKP about now.

I’ve not given up on Raspberry Pi based hosting, but I will consider buying a cheap UPS or getting an alternative storage solution before giving it another go. I suspect the frequent power outages I’ve experienced lately has led to irreparable SD card corruption.

The following lines was the last thing I was able to extract from the syslog, a kind of final goodbye:

[1999531.430039] mmc0: Problem switching card into high-speed mode!
[1999542.039969] mmc0: timeout waiting for hardware interrupt.
[1999542.044194] bcm2835-dma 3f007000.dma: DMA transfer could not be terminated
[1999542.044322] mmcblk0: error -110 transferring data, sector 6381568, nr 264, cmd response 0x900, card status 0x80b00
[1999542.044330] mmcblk0: retrying using single block read
[1999542.099949] mmc0: PIO read timeout - EDM 10801
[1999552.919970] mmc0: timeout waiting for hardware interrupt.
[1999563.229958] mmc0: PIO read timeout - EDM 10871
[1999573.399989] mmc0: timeout waiting for hardware interrupt.
[1999583.719602] mmc0: PIO read timeout - EDM 10801

Anyhow, for the moment this blog is running on a Gentoo Linux VPS hosted with Scaleway. I do believe I’ve gotten most of the issues sorted out by now, but some hiccups are to be expected.