Fedora, Assorted

Fedora boxes at home: a storage server with a SMART counter that pointed at the wrong drive, and a desktop whose video player found the wrong library.

Every HDD on the Fedora storage box vanished at once. It was two mundane faults stacked together, then an HBA with no temperature sensor to read, a reallocated-sector count that pointed at the wrong drive, a dying disk partitioned around its bad blocks, and a daily SMART digest rewritten so it can be read at 3am. Then a KDE desktop where mpv played HEVC fine and Haruna, built on libmpv, found no decoder behind the same soname. Last, the GPU that post first blamed for HEVC Main 10: the hardware decodes HEVC, Fedora's Mesa leaves it out of its VA-API driver, and ffmpeg exits 0 while it falls back to the CPU. 7 posts.

1. All four drives at once, and why that was the good news
2. Stop chasing a sensor that doesn't exist
3. Reallocated sectors: is your drive dying or just scarred?
4. Salvaging a dying disk by partitioning around the wound
5. Designing alerts you'll actually understand at 3am
6. Two libavcodecs behind one soname
7. The GPU wasn't to blame