forum.excito.org

Hi.
Wondering if anyone has any ideas. I'm pulling my hair here. I had a power outage this morning. Thanks to ups I had the time to shut down my servers gracefully. However now that power is back they don't start. The B3 is stuck on purple light, I've been waiting for over an hour now. It doesn't answer on it's ssh port and stuff like postfix and dovecot doesn't seem to be up. I can however reach all files using nfs.

I wonder if the problem could be my Apache cert. I bought a "real" cert and didn't want to store the password for it, so when I've restarted Apache lately I've had to input the password manually. Could it be that B3 is hanging there waiting for me to input the password? And that other services (like for example ssh) don't get the chance of starting before Apache is started? If so, how do I resolve that? Just hoping someone says I don't need to start fiddling with rescue sticks...

/Daniel

edit: By the way, anyone knows where I can find a rescue stick image nowadays?

edit2: Yep, I'm now quite sure that the Apache cert password is the problem. Had the exact same problem on my CuBox server and fixed it there using console cable. Feeling kinda stupid here. Anyway, I'm still stick. Either I could fix it using my B3 console cable, but it has been in a drawer too long and the connector is kinda broken. Anyone know which pin should go where? Or I could boot from rescue stick, but I just can't seem to find any download (for example the link on http://wiki.mybubba.org/wiki/index.php? ... cue_System is broken nowadays). Feeling like a sitting duck...

The install image is here:

http://install.mybubba.org/

But, don't forget to edit the config file accordingly, by default it formats your drive.

johannes wrote:The install image is here:

http://install.mybubba.org/

But, don't forget to edit the config file accordingly, by default it formats your drive.

Thanks a lot! Followed the wiki instructions. First the led goes green and then it goes purple. I can see the B3 taking a dhcp lease so I know what IP it gets, but it doesn't respond on port 22. Any idea what could be wrong?

/Daniel

edit: Btw, is the wiki really correct, saying that I should mkfs.vfat /dev/sdc? I mean, should the file system be on the partition I created?

edit2: Ok, solved the rescue boot. However, now I've completely disabled all apache sites using SSL and it still doesn't boot, so there ought to be something else. What the f*ck! Is there any good way to get to know what isn't working during boot?

edit3: Wheheheey! I made it! I simply disabled a lot of deamons (renamed S-links in /etc/rc2.d to K) and now it boots! More detective work follows, but now I'm on the road!

I bet you didn't really bother to look at any of the log files during this process did you?

Ubi wrote:I bet you didn't really bother to look at any of the log files during this process did you?

In fact I did, but I didn't really find anything that was helping me. At least no big red warnings.

I have to say though that when stuff like this happens I'm not really working rationally, rather in a quite panicked way...

Btw, I've nog got an USB stick labelled "USB rescue" in my drawer, feels good to have

/Daniel

So now that you are more zen, it may be worth doing a bit of a postmortem so see what was the underlying cause. especially the Apache issue should be well documented in the http logfiles.

Ubi wrote:So now that you are more zen, it may be worth doing a bit of a postmortem so see what was the underlying cause. especially the Apache issue should be well documented in the http logfiles.

Unfortunately, even now I can't find anything really useful in the logs. However I'm quite sure that the ssl cert password in Apache was the problem, since it still asks for it when I start the daemon. I have no real use for Apache on my B3 any longer though, so I just leave it disabled and problem is out of the world

/Daniel

if apache asks about the cert at startup, it could be that you created a cert with a password. That doesnt work with apache.

Ubi wrote:if apache asks about the cert at startup, it could be that you created a cert with a password. That doesnt work with apache.

I know that's the problem. It felt more secure to have it that way. And it works if the daemon is started interactively (ie from ssh) because then I can simply type in the password when Apache prompts for it. I just didn't think about the possibility of the password question stopping the entire boot. I don't reboot my B3 very often

I've also now found out why Apache still asked for the password even though I'd disabled all sites using ssl. I simply grepped for SSL in in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled and removed everything that matched, but I had a site (bubba) that was just a softlink to /usr/share/bubba-frontend/apache.site and while I was on rescue stick that softlink was broken so my grep didn't find the SSL configuration in it.

/Daniel