THIS MONTH THE DOCTOR TACKLES...

> Fix server problems

> Extend movie files

> OEM license

Server teething troubles

I followed your feature on building a new server, but decided to install Ubuntu 24.04 LTS instead of Debian, as I know it better, and the new LTS supports Podman 4.9.3. So far, so good, but I’ve run into two annoying problems. The major one is that if I leave the server unattended for a short period, my Nextcloud client reports that the server is disconnected. If I log on to the server through cockpit, the connection is restored, but as soon as I leave the server to its own devices, it disconnects again.

The second problem is that I cannot get the server to shut down on a schedule. I’ve edited both user and root instances of crontab, but however I phrase the command, it’s ignored. Can you suggest what to do?

—Charles S Currier

THE DOCTOR RESPONDS: The answer to the first of Charles’ problems was buried in the system logs. We directed him to the Logs section of cockpit, where he immediately saw a series of warnings that containers were closing and going to sleep after a period of inactivity. By widening the filter to show events with a priority of ‘Info and above’, Charles was able to trace the precise point at which the containers started to shut themselves down with the following message:

pam_unix(cron:session): session closed for user Charles

This confirmed that Charles hadn’t set his user account to ‘linger’, which ensures that rootless Podman containers continue to run in the background even when the user has logged out or after the server has been left idle. The fix is a single command: sudo loginctl enable-linger