ODROID HC2 - No network after reboot (Solved, fstab issue)

[Pinguino]

This is something I've just realized has been popping up for me for as long as I've been using armbian the past year or so with my ODROID.

 

After a clean setup, I use armbian-config to edit the network settings (ethernet connection) to a static IP address, and everything works fine. I reboot the changes and go on my way. The problem comes after I reboot days/weeks later for kernel updates or if I lost power. The board turns on fine but refuses to show up on my network and therefore cannot SSH to the system. Looking through the SD card and checking the files shows that /etc/network/interfaces is devoid of any static IP changes made through the config, although it looks like correct information is shown under /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/Wired\ Connection\ 1.

 

The board light flashes a steady blue and seems to be functioning otherwise, but the logs don't really show anything after the reboot. I do have lines in /etc/fstab for filesystems that aren't present at boot, could the process be hanging on that? Is there even an easy way to debug this as it's not like I can plug in a monitor and see the boot messages?

 

Wired Connection - NetworkManager connection file

Auth log prior to reboot

Syslog reboot

[Tido]

armbianmonitor -u  tells the reader all the details about ur Installation, like Kernel Version and much more

[Pinguino]

Where are the files it pulls from to output the info? Or is there a way to run it with just the filesystem available? I can't SSH into the server at all in order to run the command. The armbian-ramlog.log file's latest entry is from earlier and doesn't show anything useful, and armbian-hardware-monitor.log is empty. log.1 isn't but the latest date is August 22nd.

 

 

[Tido]

Did you create a backup before the update?

So you could do the update again and run  armbianmonitor -u  before the reboot.

If you have a serial-cable UART, you can follow the reboot live on another PC.

[Pinguino]

I don't think I have anything very recent, my last backup was probably a month away as the / on the SD card is very static for the most part. The majority of R/W hits the HDD.

 

Would it be possible to chroot into the SD card image with some help from qemu? I'm sure I've seen it possible with Raspbian but I'm not sure if it'd differ with Armbian.

[Pinguino]

So my hunch was right!

 

My idea was what I had mentioned in the OP, with the fstab as the cause of my issues. Once I found that the static IP settings hadn't actually been wiped at boot, I thought it was very strange that there were zero logs about the boot process to be found anywhere on the system. The only reason there wouldn't be logs is that the system never actually completed the boot process and something was halting it.

 

Now the only thing I have modified that occurs during the boot process is the mounting of a number of different drives, which I know has caused me issues on my laptop as well (with an NFS share). Removing the lines for the drives that aren't connected to the board fixed it! The fstab entries had no options to account for it missing which is what most likely caused the hanging while the kernel tried to look for them. I'll edit that up in the future, but I'm just glad I was able to figure this out. Wish I would've thought of this the other times it's ocurred where I've just reinstalled it all!