Slackware ARM on the Raspberry Pi 2- The 1 year mark

Since I hit the one year mark today I thought I would do a quick update on my RPi2 project. A short recap to kick things off: the project had a rough start due to some overly ambitious overclocking that eventually resulted in severe data corruption. However, after implementing the necessary modifications I enjoyed close to 300 days of easy uptime before a power failure took the RPi2 down. My initial thought after the power failure was that everything was still dandy, but a few weeks later things started to go downhill fast. It all began with a few file system errors:

# Mar 17 08:06:04 kernel: EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p3):
error count since last fsck: 17
initial error at time 1458111903: htree_dirblock_to_tree:1000..
last error at time 1458111912: ext4_lookup:1588: inode 514527

Before I could power down the RPi2 to correct the errors, the server panicked and crashed. Repairing the file system only gave me a few days before another batch of file system errors emerged. This time around though, instead of throwing a kernel panic the RPi2 simply rebooted and froze during the boot up process. This kind of behavior can usually be attributed to hardware errors.

Considering that the file system errors were likely an indication of a failing MicroSD card, I decided it was time to replace it. Since I bought a few extra cards of the same brand when I got the RPi2, I simply repaired and cloned my running card to a new healthy one. That was the end of fs errors and the server was stable for the next couple of weeks.

My serenity came to a close this Wednesday when a new batch of “Oops’s” resulted in kernel panic. The initial cause this time was a segmentation fault caused by a dhcpcd-run-hook process. Dhcpcd was recently updated in Slackware current, but that could be entirely unrelated to my issue.

I’m currently undecided whether I’ll upgrade the server to run on a RPi3 or simply move this website to a cloud based VPS. I’d like to at least give it a shot with the RPi3, but considering all the issues I’m having lately I’m still on the fence. I’ll probably end up going with the Raspberry Pi though, there is just something special about having my own pocket size webserver.

The story so far: self hosting WordPress on a RPi2