First I have to thank all maintainers for their work. I ran this server for 1.5 years before something broke. Since armbian is maintained by volunteers I want to cheer you up and thank you for your hard work.
However just today my little server would die after apt-update/upgrade. I use a SATA drive together with a boot SD-card (only containing /boot). I can observe the following behavior:
The system leds indicate that booting is sucessful (blue LED does blink regularly, I
I'm in the same trouble.
It boot well on my SDcard then i do a rsync of the root to the encrypted ssd change the boot.ini to boot to the ssd as everytime i did.
~ # sudo sed -e 's/root=[^ ]*/root=\/dev\/sdg\/root cryptopts=source=\/dev\/sda,target=sdc,lvm=sdg /' -i /boot/boot.ini
~ # sudo update-initramfs -u
then it boot first on the initramfs well and i have access to the busybox ssh.
then I execute cryptroot_unlock it seems to start initializing well but without network