Weheeee! Discovered the cause of the VM crash - out of memory issue during git pull.
But I need to get this to complete, and it completes fine on most near-identical VMs, and it's cloud, so I can't just throw more RAM at it (we're cheapskates, and it would make for obnoxious DNS entry changes, etc.)
So now I'm running it again immediately after rebooting the VM, monitoring RAM usage. If it gets down to 50 MB free, I'll kill the git pull and give up on it for tonight.
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32 GB VM, currently hovering between 120 and 140 MB free RAM.
Woo! The git pull finished without ever running *TOO* low on RAM!
Now the decryption step - still hovering ~120 MB freeβ¦
And that finished *whew*, back up to 1 GB free. The rest of this process shouldn't get it close to running out.
(It seems that the git pull's network traffic, combined with running out of RAM, was causing the VM's network stack to crash, making the OS uncontactable.)