Incident

01

15 min read

Kernel panic on a Debian NAS: recovering a truncated libc without rebooting into the void

One February morning, my Terramaster F6-424 NAS running Debian 13 won't boot. Immediate kernel panic on the very first userspace exec. No recovery mode, single kernel installed, aggressive hardening: the system has no way to catch itself. Full story of the diagnosis (libc.so.6 turned into "ISO-8859 text" instead of ELF), the recovery from a live USB (with the apt↔libc chicken-and-egg trap), and the 2026 best practices I applied so it never happens again. Bonus: a second incident in May that revealed the real root cause.