ASword Posted December 5, 2020 Posted December 5, 2020 I have an N2+ that I'm flashing Debian Buster onto an emm card. Have tried numerous times in several variations -- flash emm, boot system, log in via ssh, set up personal account, "apt update", "apt upgrade", reboot. After that I cannot log in via ssh anymore. I am using the system in headless mode and don't currently have a working serial connection (SiLabs hasn't updated their drivers to Big Sur yet) so I can't tell if the system is booting but ssh isn't working. Anyone know why "apt upgrade" would cause it to not boot or not present an ssh server properly?
Igor Posted December 5, 2020 Posted December 5, 2020 Sometimes it hangs at boot loader. Power cycle helps.
ASword Posted December 5, 2020 Author Posted December 5, 2020 I've power cycled quite a few times... how many should I expect? And is this an "always" problem with Armbian, or just after an update? Bit of a non-starter for me if its an always.
Igor Posted December 5, 2020 Posted December 5, 2020 Just now, ASword said: And is this an "always" problem with Armbian, or just after an update? Bit of a non-starter for me if its an always. Two types of problem could explain your symptoms - one is elimited, second is this https://github.com/armbian/build/issues/2106 ... neither is manifesting with my N2+ To diagnose your problem, you have to tell exact steps - we need to reproduce this problem since you didn't provide nothing, no logs to debug. Which image? URL or a exact filename.
ASword Posted December 5, 2020 Author Posted December 5, 2020 Armbian_20.08.22_Odroidn2_buster_current_5.9.6.img Booted, created 4 users. Then apt update, then apt upgrade. Then reboot again, and it doesn't come back up (that I can tell).
ASword Posted December 5, 2020 Author Posted December 5, 2020 I've noticed that after powering it on there is a period when ssh waits until it says operation timed out, and after a while there is a period when it immediately says the host is down, then it goes back to waiting for it to time out. Seems to be repeating that at some cadence, so... trying to boot, failing and starting again?
Solution Igor Posted December 5, 2020 Solution Posted December 5, 2020 1 hour ago, ASword said: Armbian_20.08.22_Odroidn2_buster_current_5.9.6.img Why don't you use latest build? 20.11?
ASword Posted December 6, 2020 Author Posted December 6, 2020 lol... that was the latest build when I grabbed it. I guess more time went by since than I was aware. Will give it a go.
ASword Posted December 6, 2020 Author Posted December 6, 2020 Well this build certainly works a lot better (so far). Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
TRS-80 Posted December 6, 2020 Posted December 6, 2020 1 hour ago, ASword said: that was the latest build when I grabbed it What you think we are doing around here? Playing around?!
ASword Posted December 6, 2020 Author Posted December 6, 2020 Heh, no, no, not at all. Unfortunately, after I installed a few more things I need (daemons, compilers, etc) it has stopped booting again. It all seems innocuous and not the kind of things that ought to stop the OS from booting! I’ll have to start over and reboot after every item to narrow down the cause.
Igor Posted December 6, 2020 Posted December 6, 2020 2 hours ago, ASword said: it has stopped booting again. Now, this is intriguing and if you want our assistance - you need to tell us everything. All steps which lead you to here. This should not happen. Only occasional hang at boot loader is present, but that is (always) workarounded with a power cycle.
ASword Posted December 7, 2020 Author Posted December 7, 2020 Yes, I'm building up a setup script so rebuilding my OS config isn't such a big deal. Just starting to go systematically through the steps again to see where the boot fails again. Should have more details soon. Okay, so to be clear: there is a known hang at boot that requires a manual power cycle? Good to know while diagnosing my setup script, plus that's a show stopper for me since my application requires automatic and dependable restart after a reboot. I presume this is being debugged and we can expect an eventual solution? Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to get my N2 to boot at all anymore, using either eMMC nor an SDCard, all with fresh flashes of the latest Armbian build. A bit mystified by how that can be.
Igor Posted December 7, 2020 Posted December 7, 2020 3 hours ago, ASword said: Okay, so to be clear: there is a known hang at boot that requires a manual power cycle? Good to know while diagnosing my setup script, plus that's a show stopper for me since my application requires automatic and dependable restart after a reboot. I presume this is being debugged and we can expect an eventual solution? Yes, and is random and doesn't manifest for all. Probably it will be fixed soon, perhaps already is. I assume you don't have serial console to debug better - that is handy in such cases.
ASword Posted December 7, 2020 Author Posted December 7, 2020 unfortunately SiLabs haven’t updated their OS X drivers to make them BigSur friendly yet, and I needed BigSur for another project. Well this is curious (and probably not usefully reproducible). My N2+ was refusing to boot and re-flashing the eMMC wasn't helping, so I flashed an SDCard and tried that (with eMMC removed). Didn't work. In frustration I flipped the MMC/SPI switch to SPI and back, and powered it back on (with both the eMMC and SDCard installed). Lo'and'behold it booted! So I went through the initial set-password-and-create-user-account process, then rebooted again... after which I had to do the initial setup process _again_. Now it boots as expected -- so for some reason the first time it booted from the SDcard, and the second time it booted from the eMMC (with both flash devices inserted). The docs seem to say it ought to prefer the eMMC if it is present, but apparently it didn't. Anyhow, haven't gotten any further yet. I think my residual problem arose because I installed too much while backports was in the apt sources list. By only having it active while I installed clang/llvm 8, and nothing else, I seem to end up in a good state. So far.
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