TrueNAS was power-cycled, the CIFS mounts failed, and systemd never retried
-- mount units are not restarted on failure. SMB came back, nothing
remounted, and immich-server served an empty library for days while its
database still listed 14,181 assets pointing at /mnt/media/originals.
fstab carried no _netdev, no nofail and no automount, so there was no path
back without a human. Now:
x-systemd.automount any access re-attempts the mount; failure stops
being terminal
_netdev / nofail ordered after network-online, dead NAS cannot block boot
soft I/O errors instead of blocking forever, so the
container can be restarted rather than wedging in
uninterruptible sleep
idle-timeout unmount when unused, clearing stale handles
resilienthandles SMB3 rides out brief blips
ansible.posix.mount mounts directly and never starts the generated
.automount unit, leaving the on-access trigger inactive -- enable it
explicitly, or the headline fix silently does nothing.
The containers are systemd USER units while the mounts are SYSTEM units, so
RequiresMountsFor= is unavailable. cifs-watchdog bridges the scopes: checks
health, recovers, and restarts ONLY immich-server (the sole consumer of both
paths; postgres/redis/ML use local volumes).
Two bugs the umount test caught, both worth knowing:
- `ls` cannot test mountedness. An unmounted mount point is an ordinary
empty directory, so ls succeeds and recovery was skipped entirely.
- A drop repaired within a single run leaves prev=healthy, so keying the
restart solely on the stored state skipped it while the container still
held its stale view.
Also moves the SMB password out of /etc/fstab, which is 0644 and was
readable by every local user, into a 0600 credentials file.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Deploy Home
There's no place like home!
Just as Dorothy managed the simple task of clicking her heels together, the desire for an equally simple one-button push deployment was in my heart. Thus, this repository was made.
Ansible
Ansible, along with double encrypted secrets, deploys the necessary configurations to make the home fit for certain needs and desires. Namely, having access to my home from anywhere, securely, and a self-hosted CI server that easily ties into existing workflows.
Makefile
The makefile is primarily used as a wrapper script to ensure that necessary
files, such as the secret vault password file, are provisioned as part of this.
One such addition to the task is utilizing dependency pinning through the
utilization of Python's virtualenv to lock down the specific dependency
versions within the requirements.txt file. This, ideally, prevents any
deployment issues with dependency version woes (e.g. version conflicts, major
updates in newest versions, etc.)
| Target Name | Description |
|---|---|
lint |
(default) Runs yamllint and ansible-lint on all YAML files in ansible/ |
deploy |
Deploys everything, or only tasks specified in TAGS= environment variable |
check |
Runs deploy in a "dry-run", showing diff-style outputs on tasks indicating changes |
vault |
Opens the Ansible vault file for editing |