Category Archives: boot issues

boot issues, networking, video, vnc, Windows

Headless Windows 10

The oldest physical box in the house, a 12 years old Core2 Quad in an old case was my Windows 10 box, nutmeg, which I don’t use very much except to test out various things under Windows. I don’t do much with Windows any more, yet it was attached to one of the three monitors on my desk – using up 1/3 of my total screen real estate; and it was generating heat and fan noise, and its presence offended me. I decided it needed to move to the basement, alongside Cinnamon and Rosemary who are already down there in a rack — banished to the basement because they have a lot of disk drives, and so generate a lot of heat and noise.

I bought another rack mount chassis, and moved nutmeg’s innards to it. This proved annoyingly difficult because various old bits of hardware decided this was a good time to give up the ghost – I lost two old disk drives that decided to stop functioning. But eventually got everything up and running.

The idea was that I would manage the box, on the relatively few occasions I needed to do so, just as I do both Cinnamon and Rosemary, with a VNC connection. So after it was up and running on my work table, I pulled the monitor, keyboard and mouse and rebooted. But attempting to connect with VNC failed. For the record, this was TightVNC.

I eventually found that VNC would work if and only if I had a monitor attached. Furthermore, if I had a monitor attached and established a VNC viewer to nutmeg, if I then unplugged the monitor the VNC viewer would immediately freeze. WTF?

Without making this a long story, I found that the problem could be resolved by changing an option in Settings/Accounts/Sign-in options which is down at the bottom under Privacy, and reads “Use my sign-in info to automatically finish setting up my device after an update or restart.”

So my mental model of what is going on is that if that option is set, windows is attempting to “set up my device” and I suppose the device it is trying to “set up” must be the monitor. What I don’t exactly get is why the VNC viewer should freeze when an existing monitor is removed. I suppose that removal generates some event internally, and processes attached in some way as consumers must be killed or something. Not sure. I don’t need to understand it. I have very few cycles in my advanced age and am not planning to waste any of them trying to figure out Windows.

I was very pleased that after I did this, and was able to connect via VNC, I was able to set the resolution to various values up to 4K. And after rebooting and reattaching it even retained my display resolution setting.

arch linux, boot issues, gateways, linux, networking, raspberry pi, raspbian, ubuntu

Waiting for networks

I was revising some things in my startup scripts. I have a sort of generalized startup script in all the boxes in my constellation, which is capable of doing 8 or 10 different things that various of the boxes need to do at startup.

For example, the various gateway boxes need to open up (auto)ssh connections to my house with reverse tunnels so I can reach them. On some boxes I want them to open a vncserver so I can get a graphical environment up. On some others they may need to mount some filesystems, with smb or nfs. On some of them I want them to figure out where their router is, in case I want to open up their router in a browser. On some I need them to establish the keychain.

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arch linux, boot issues, linux, networking, ubuntu

Stop pulseaudio startup under gdm

GDM is the display manager I’m using under Arch. I think it is the default DM in Arch, but I don’t really remember if I’ve changed it. In any case, the issue that has arisen is that when GDM is started by systemd after a reboot, it is launched with its own pulseaudio daemon. Then when I log in, as dee, I get a second pulseaudio daemon for dee (which is actually the desired one).

Most of the time this doesn’t matter, I guess. But I’m interested in enabling network sources in pulseaudio so I can (perhaps) have the boxes in the basement send their sound upstairs to oregano. Right now avahi is broadcasting two different network sound services on oregano, one from dee and one from gdm.

I want to stop pulseaudio from launching under gdm.

I thought this would be a simple matter of turning off autospawn in the client conf. The client conf is located in ~/.config/pulse (I think it used to be in ~/.pulse and was moved to be more “correct”). And ~ for gdm is /var/lib/gdm, so I tried client.conf in both .config/pulse/client.conf and .pulse/client.conf, but neither worked.

Poked around a little more and discovered that /usr/lib/systemd/user has a pulseaudio.service and pulseaudio.socket so these are actually being launched there by systemd. After a little reading I found that one could mask them by creating a local user override in ~/.config/systemd (for gdm this is /var/lib/gdm/.config/systemd), so I put in a /var/lib/gdm/.config/systemd/user/pulseaudio.socket and symlinked it to /dev/null.

And when I rebooted, sure enough I got not pulseaudio daemon for gdm.

boot issues, linux, ubuntu

Packagekit adjustments in ubuntu

When I tried to upgrade Cinnamon to Focal, I began to experience a lot of odd problems with VNC and GDM and the whole collection of machinery associated with getting a graphical environment particularly in a remote window. Cinnamon is physically downstairs in a rack in the basement, and my usual way of working is 80-90% ssh/command line and occasionally vinagre in an adjacent monitor with screens for a dozen or so places that I occasionally need to see graphically, including Cinnamon, but Vinagre usually stays pointed at Rosemary (also in the basement).

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arch linux, boot issues, fedora, linux, mysql, networking

Moving Oregano to arch

It is by no means certain that I will succeed with this effort, but I’m spending some time trying to get Oregano up on Arch.

The first step was just to get Arch booted up on oregano. My previous installation on a laptop didn’t involve an encrypted root, didn’t have raid arrays, didn’t have separate filesystems for things like /home and /var, didn’t run a web server, etc., so the first challenge is to get the system up with all that stuff.

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arch linux, boot issues, fedora, linux, ubuntu, video

Forcing Monitor resolution

Cinnamon and Rosemary are now both happily rack-mounted in the basement (where it is cool, and where their many disk drives and fans can make as much racket as they wish).

Mostly I control them from the office with ssh and or vnc, but once in a while I need to actually be down there. My neighbor gave me a monitor, I have plenty of mice and keyboards, so I hooked up a KVM switch on the two of them so I didn’t have to keep getting behind the rack to move the monitor.

But alas, neither of them picked up the resolution of the monitor, I suppose (not sure) that with the KVM in the middle, they can’t really read the EDID and such stuff from the monitor. And since it is an “unknown” monitor, the display panel only shows 1024×768, 800×600 etc. The monitor itself helpfully tells me that it wants to be 1440×900 @60Hz.

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boot issues, linux, ubuntu, virtualization

XEN Fails to boot with 48G

I had in mind (still do) to use Cinnamon as a host for virtual machine. In fact, I have had that idea in the back of my mind for many years. Recently that idea percolated up to the top again, and one thing I did was to buy some additional ram for it, I bought a 16G stick and tried to add it. It wouldn’t boot. The very poorly written manual on the motherboard seems to suggest that it absolutely requires one to have balanced sticks in the dimm slots. I find that hard to believe, but decided it couldn’t hurt to comply, and bought another stick, so I would have 2 8G sticks, and 2 16G sticks, 48G.

It still wouldn’t boot. But I noticed that this doesn’t look like the hardware is failing – it gets up into Xen and then stops. I don’t think this is a hardware problem with the memory.

After some googling around I found an article on the Suse website with a similar thing, saying that Dom0 won’t come up if it has more than 32G of memory, and offering a solution.

I’m very ignorant about Xen. I have never really gotten beyond installing it, with my Cinnamon ubuntu installation in Dom0 and using all the resources. But, but it is clear of course that the right way to do this is for the Dom 0 to be small and confined to its management job, and Cinnamon should actually be a Dom U.

What seems to be true is that if you do not specify on the command line, the Dom 0 will come up with all the memory. And that if you have more than 32GB of memory for it to come up with it will fail. Thus if you have more than 32GB of memory, you MUST avail yourself of the command line to limit the memory available to Dom 0.

I added to the linux command line in the default grub,:

dom0_mem=8G

And the box came up fine. Once I manage to get Cinnamon and it’s functions into separate Dom U, I will reduce the dom0 down to 1 G or so.

arch linux, boot issues, linux

Setting up Arch on UEFI laptop

A good friend had mentioned to me that he used Arch linux in one of his recent installs. I’ve never tried it. I have this old HP laptop that a different friend gave me, when he replaced it. It isn’t that old! I decided to try installing Arch on it.

I had a bunch of issues, and ultimately today I resolved to reinstall the thing again, and record my experience. One of the issues – as usual a self-inflicted wound – is that this is a UEFI capable laptop, but the disk that is in it is MBR partitioned, not GUID partitioned. It probably would have been smarter to just partition the disk with a GUID table. But I didn’t. Below is the description of what I did.

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boot issues, fedora, linux, ubuntu

Root Account is locked

A few months ago Fedora crashed, and wouldn’t boot. It seems to do that from time to time. I have about had it with Fedora. I have at least three times as much trouble with Fedora as I do with Ubuntu.

So I reinstalled Fedora. I was back-level anyway, as I have grown very cautious of their automatic update – which about a third of the time ends up requiring a full system rebuild. My thinking about it wasn’t quite this black and white, but might has well have been: “It’s going to crash eventually, and require me to scrape it down to the bare metal – I might as well wait till that happens, rather than hastening the process by trying to update fedora.”

Anyway, on that occasion back in May, I rebuilt a new Fedora 30 system on a new disk, and restored everything.

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boot issues, fedora, linux

Fedora Crash, again

Preparing to go off on my semi-annual visit east I was trying to ensure that the primary systems here that have encrypted root drives (oregano, cinnamon and rosemary) could each be rebooted from afar by attaching to a dropbear instance during the initramfs. See article on booting notes about that.

Somehow Oregano became unbootable. Again. It usually takes three or four hours of flailing around to figure out what little thing has caused it to point its casters to the sky. It takes only a little longer to just rebuild from scratch with the latest release.

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