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KVM VPS hardware errors?
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KVM VPS hardware errors?

I have a $2.50/mo 4GB, 150GB KVM VPS with a low end vendor. The name of the company is not important for this question. I realize I am on my own for management. Their standard Debian image seems to work fine, the little bit I tested it. I am interested in NixOS lately, so I installed NixOS via VNC and iPXE using netboot.xyz. Things go normally for awhile, and then the system wedges. I open a ticket to have the system reimaged, and it sort of is back to normal, but then it wedges again.

Here is the state when it wedges. Even after using the "reinstall a standard image" function from the control panel, the machine eventually responds only on port 53, which is quite odd. No ssh port, of course. VNC connects and then updates very, very slowly. I see a slowly scrolling dump of kernel messages, such as here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cpi4fqox6pkp4ig/vnc1.PNG?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/iw5mag7cpcwtzjv/vnc2.PNG?dl=0

In those images, I see watchdog timeouts of 22 seconds, RedHat KVM BIOS messages,
register dumps, stack traces, etc. I shared these images in a support ticket, and they rebuilt
the box to a working Debian, but otherwise were silent on what is going on.

During my last install of NixOS, I got several Buffer I/O errors on specific logical blocks.
After the initial reboot I tried to update the system (nixos-rebuild) and that failed with a lot of errors about ELF binary formats. If I can get it booting off netboot.xyz again, I plan to run a
badblock scan with e2fsck, and see if I can validate the disk.

Can anyone tell at what level the issue is? Do the VNC traces point to problems in the real hardware, the KVM kernel, the disk, or what?

In this low end box world, you win some and you lose some. Maybe it is time to cut bait on this deal...

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