Well written, and I learned a few things from this story. I recently started a cloud of my own with 4 20TiB HDDs in a raid 5 configuration so this story felt very prescient to me. Makes me very grateful for the simplicity of Cockpit and LUKS2… my setup felt so trivial to configure!

That is good but only shows the last 10-15 lines of the log, unless there is an arg to expand that, or a command to follow the log. I am aware of neither.

I usually use your suggested command to check if a service is up, then if it isn’t, use journalctl to find out why.

tbh my go to command is just… journalctl -fe -u service

ex :
journalctl -fe -u jellyfin
journalctl -fe -u nordvpnd

so I’d also like to know the answer to this question. my other go to is dumping journalctl to text files and parsing with grep and awk and creating my own reports with that parsed information.

grep -E is my favorite, I love regex capturing groups.