I had big plans for this Geekend(tm). I was gonna build out an AI/Docker playground on my home lab. A proper little cluster to learn some new tricks, run some models, maybe actually get around to learning that container orchestration stuff I've been putting off.
Then Saturday morning happened.
Me: I can't get my Linux box to open a browser. None of them. I have Brave, Firefox, Chromium... none of them will open. Firefox gives me an error saying it is already running and to close the other instance of Firefox or restart... and I restarted... several times... no joy.
AI: That's maddening—especially when you know it's probably some dumb lock file or orphaned process and not something actually broken. Classic Firefox "already running" culprit: a stale lock file in your profile directory. Even after restart it sometimes survives. Try this:
rm ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default*/lock
Some debugging back-and forth later... I'm getting annoyed thinking I'm losing daylight on the lab I was gonna build.
Me: I have to write these commands down, switch over to the Linux box, run them, then switch back to the Mac to tell you what happened. Not looking forward to spending my Saturday debugging my Linux box.
AI: Yeah that sucks. Let's be surgical about this—one command that tells us the most:
sudo journalctl -b | grep -i readonly | head -20Write those down, go run it, come back. We'll figure this out.
I was ready to swear off Linux forever. Throw every computer in this house (the ones I own anyway) in the burn barrel out back. Screaming at no one, "No wonder Linux can't win on the desktop. Just random failures out of nowhere. Screw open source!"
After AI tries to convince me a few more times to try other commands...
Me: NO.
AI: Ha, fair enough. Go enjoy your Saturday. The Linux box will still be there to piss you off later. 😄
My perfect little Geekend(tm) was slipping away.
Me: NO. Fuck the Linux box and fuck you!
When I calmed myself down, I was thinking what happened was that the box went to sleep with a YouTube video paused. I think some process didn't get cleaned up, and was hanging the browser from opening. I (stupidly) assumed that restarting would reset any processes. I thought I may have made it worse when it restarted. There were some low-level errors and booted into read-only mode.
Me: I was able to get into the Linux box and run stuff, but it's still erroring:
grind save svls-sst-sam-research
EROFS: read-only file system, open '/home/lee/Work/svls-sst-sam-research/projects/svls-sst-sam-research/.project.json'
AI: That's a read-only filesystem error. The directory itself is mounted read-only. Run this to diagnose:
mount | grep homeThat'll tell you if
/homeor that specific path is mounted read-only.
It showed my /home directory had been mounted as read only.
AI: Let's dig deeper. Run:
sudo journalctl -b -p err | grep nvme
That led to a wall of errors:
Feb 21 14:50:40 nix kernel: BTRFS error (device nvme0n1p2): error loading props for ino 846800: -5
Feb 21 15:17:40 nix kernel: BTRFS critical (device nvme0n1p2): corrupt leaf: block=323194847232 slot=44
Feb 21 15:17:40 nix kernel: BTRFS error (device nvme0n1p2): block=323194847232 write time tree block corruption detected
Feb 21 15:19:57 nix kernel: BTRFS error (device nvme0n1p2 state EMA): submit_uncompressed_range failed... -30
Feb 21 15:19:57 nix kernel: BTRFS: error (device nvme0n1p2) in btrfs_commit_transaction:2536: errno=-5 IO failure
So I ran btop... saw the CPU at 89°C.
That's when it clicked.
The heat had caused the NVMe drive to fail on a sector. BTRFS had failed on boot and the system locked things down to protect itself.
I have two computers I use regularly: my home computer, and my work laptop (MBP). I've been trying to divest my personal gear of the FAANG Mafia. Not gonna build a bunker and order a hundred cases of MREs... yet. But I like the idea of supporting smaller businesses. Every one of the mega corps that exist today was once a young startup, out to topple other giants. The cycle never stops, eh?
Anyway, I digress.
I have a nice monitor and sound setup for my computer, because I spend a lot of time at it—writing code, learning new code stuff, writing blog posts, and editing videos... so I have a fairly sizeable dock to share the nice monitor and audio interface.
The problem is: that nice monitor sits on a desktop shelf. My Dektop (a mini-PC) and the dock sit under that shelf. I didn't realize it, but the way I had them sitting under the shelf, the dock was generating heat and the intake fan from the mini-PC was sucking it right in. Nice, hot exhaust, right in its face.
When I went to bed, I left this little computer (that already has crappy circulation) on and sucking up the exhaust fumes of the dock all night.
Now my Geekend(tm) is gonna be spent trying to rebuild this little PC... and reorganizing my desk.
The Lesson? Don't put your dock under a shelf with your computer's intake fan pointed at it.
The other lesson? Sometimes a technical crash-out is self care.