armdran

I am running bookworm on a banana pi m2 zero. It comes up properly and connects to Wifi and to the attached LAN adapter, so I can access it via SSH on both interfaces. BUT, when I disconnect the keyboard, it doesn't boot properly anymore and I cannot connect to it. I attached a monitor to take a look at the startup messages and found that it hangs at starting the hostname service (see screenshot) How can I get it to boot properly?

The problem happens easily when there is written a lot to /var/log. This can even corrupt your system when an apt dist-upgrade fails right in the middle due to lack of space in /var/log. The problem is due to armbian ramlog on devices with little ram, like older raspberry or banana pis. The easiest way to solve it, is to disable ramlog in /etc/default/armbian-ramlog and zram in /etc/default/armbian-zram-config. Be aware though that this makes heavier use of your SD card, though. I usually solve the problem by attaching a USB device (preferably an SSD) for swap, /var/log and /tmp or by using a large SD card which has plenty of spare blocks.

You could set ENABLED=false in /etc/default/armbian-zram-config and setup zram manually if needed (refer to man zramctl or google for it) I use a USB attached SSD as boot device instead of an SD card on almost all my standalone minis and I don't want /tmp or /var/log vanish upon reboot. Even on older devices, you can always run your system from a USB disk by loading the boot stuff from the SD card and then move on with the USB drive. To do that, just adapt the disk ids in /boot/armbianEnv.txt and /etc/fstab (=>blkid) If you just want to disable /tmp to be on zram have a look at /usr/lib/armbian/armbian-zram-config and eventually adapt it for your needs.

I did try the latest Armbian 23.5 Bookworm on my banana pi m2 zero with allwinner h3 chip and I couldn't get the USB OTG port working (i. e. no keyboard recognition) and eth0 also did not work. After a lot of searching I found an old image (BananaPi-M2zero_Armbian_2021.08.1_bullseye_CLI_5.10.60.img) which did work. I wonder what happened to the kernel Kernel 6.2.y edition and why those crucial hardware features are not working anymore. Is there a vault somewhere of older armbian software revisions?

I did install an apt install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common on my bananaPi M1. I did export some dirs and successfully mounted them from my clients. After a reboot the mounts did not work. Then I manually invoked exportfs -a and the client were able to mount. What is the correct way to get the nfs server started after a reboot?