Completely Shutdown My Computer, No LAN Connection, No USB, etc.

[mhumm2]

I really screwed up this time. I've been working on my Ubuntu Server 18.04.1LTS for several weeks. https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...Server-18-04-1

This morning when I booted up, I was unable to do anything. The following are the symptoms of the problem:
- Boot up took longer and a message came up on the splash screen: Waiting for network configuration
- The USB keyboard and mouse were inop.
- screen resolution had dropped to 1024x768
- when I opened a terminal I received a message: Broadcast message from root@AMD-64 (somewhere). Lost connection with UPS.
- ifconfig only shows the lo loopback connection

The last thing I was doing before shutting the computer down was upgrading my packages from within synaptic. The upgrade failed even though I chose for synaptic to ignore the Pithos music streaming app upgrade (its repository was failing to read). After the entire upgrade failed, I tried to delte the Pithos repository from my sources list again, from within synaptic. Eve after clicking on Reload, Pithos was still there. I shut the computer down since it was getting late. I planned to take care of it this morning. Well with the OS in this state I absolutely did delete the Pithos repository the old fashioned way, I used a terminal!

BTW, my current Conky configuration doesn't try to connect to the UPS. That was a very old config.

I have no idea how to recover my system. I don't know what diagnostics to run or config file to edit. I really do not want to reinstall the whole OS. Please give me some guidance.

[mhumm2]

Thank you Snowhog for correcting the URL link.

[mhumm2]

Bump! I'm still receiving the message: Broadcast message from root@AMD64 (somewhere). Warning, lost communication with UPS.

I get this message as soon as I login to my main computer using 18.04LTS. I think if I can find the source of the warning message, I'll find the source of the problem. Please advise.

[mhumm2]

Bump again! Please give me a direction to look or a configuration file to post. Perhaps the best approach is to start small; one symptom at a time.

So what OS setting or switch can wipe out the ifconfig printout showing no network connections to the OS?

Should I take the lack of response as a que that the only way to fix this is reinstall the OS? Or am I asking the question(s) incorrectly? I'm stuck. The only desktop computer I have available to me is my Kubuntu "Test" computer. This is the SSD I use to test the next LTS release I will eventually upgrade to. my normal use SSD (14.04LTS) is barely usable and my NAS computer is unusable as each one has no network connections available. I really need some help on this one.

[GreyGeek]

OK. Let's assume that since you have been working on your problem for FOUR DAYS you do NOT have a valid backup from which you can restore. And, I'll assume that you are not using Btrfs, otherwise you would have restored from a valid snapshot 15 minutes after your problem appeared.

IF you do not want to waste any more time on this problem, especially considering your level of expertise, your best solution is to:
1) Do a fresh install from a LiveUSB stick that has a checksum verified copy of BIonic (or what ever you are running).
2) After your installation is complete and you have a functional desktop running on the EXT4 filesystem, open a Konsole and do:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install timeshift
3) Plug in a USB HD, or mount an additional internal HD, that has sufficient free space to store a copy of both / and /home.
4) Run TimeShift and select both / and /home as sources and your USB HD as the destination.
5) Click the "Create" button to create your first backup. It may take 20-30 minutes, depending on the speed of your system and the HDs.
6) NOW begin making changes to your desktop and/or adding other programs. At each milestone create another backup using TimeShift. IF a change fails, or messes up your system, then restore to the previous backup and retry the change. DO NOT delete the last good backup until you have finished adding your modifications. IF you run out of room on your backup HD then delete the oldest backup to make room for the newest, but DO NOT delete all of them. Leave at least ONE good one. NEVER backup a system that is got problems. To do so is just digging your hole deeper.

An alternative to the approach above, which I do not recommend for you, is to use BTRFS as the root file system and make snapshots, which I decribed how to do in the /miscellaneous/BTRFS forum. BUT, DO NOT use TimeShift as a backup tool on a Btrfs system. IMO, it is easier and better to make snapshots and back them up to external drives manually. AND, a snapshot is not a backup until you've sent it to your external HD using the Btrfs send command.

[mhumm2]

Thank you GreyGeek for the recommendation. I was afraid I had to reinstall the OSs, but let me clarify some of the assumptions you have. I know it won't change the recommendation choice I now have.

I have not been working on the problem for 4 days. I would describe it as having a problem for 4 days that is beyond my capabilities to solve since my NAS and main computer (14.04LTS) don't "see" any network drives. I save all data to a mechanical HDD that the two SSDs I boot to on my main computer share. I boot to my Test SDD (18.04LTS) or I boot to my other SDD (14.04LTS). I also have a bootable Windoze 7.0 SDD (for a game I like), but I rarely admit to that .

I never considered the need to backup any of my OSs, but from your post, and my obvious penchant for problems, it makes a lot of sense. The data on my NAS is not lost, but it's only about 15GB of test data at this point until I get everything working (Samba or NFS, OpenVPN, and Plex or Mediatomb).

My immediate inclination is to take your first recommendation with Timeshift and another external drive (I have one). This is only because I understand it completely and know I can handle it. Although I have a RAID 5 setup and running on BTRFS, the file system still intimidates me. I know you are the defacto BTRFS gufu on KFN so I'm typing to the right person. Is it true that it's still considered unstable or experimental? I know Fedora 18 will supposedly use BTRFS as the default FS. That says a lot.

Snapshots are taken and, I assume, they can be restored just as easily. I'll continue my study of BTRFS and start warming up to it. At this point, I think I'll continue using ext4 on my 14.04LTS install. I assume switching a FS on an operational OS mean reinstalling the OS, is that correct?

Thank you again for your advise and wisdom. I absolutely respect it very much.

[GreyGeek]

....
My immediate inclination is to take your first recommendation with Timeshift and another external drive (I have one). This is only because I understand it completely and know I can handle it. Although I have a RAID 5 setup and running on BTRFS, the file system still intimidates me. I know you are the defacto BTRFS gufu on KFN so I'm typing to the right person. Is it true that it's still considered unstable or experimental? I know Fedora 18 will supposedly use BTRFS as the default FS. That says a lot.

Actually, the REAL Btrfs guru on KFN is oshunluver, not me. And no, it is not true. Btrfs has, except for RAID5&6, been considered stable for over two years. I suspect that within a year RAID 5/6 will become stable as well. I've been using Btrfs going on 4 years and it has performed flawlessly for me. I do NOT use RAID5 or 6, nor Quotas, but I did use RAID1 on two HDs for 6 months or so without any problems. Using the balance command I switched from single, to RAID1 back to Single on two HDs, and then to Single on one hd. All without a problem or the need to reinstall.

BTW, Fedora 18 is almost SIX years old! I would NEVER recommend moving to a distro that old! Red Hat is moving away from Btrfs to create its own fs, called "Stratis" which, IIRC, will be based on XFS. Why? Hard to say. Part of the NIH attitude that RH frequently displays? I think that the reason is primarily that Btrfs is under such rapid development and keeping up with and backporting those changes to previous versions was probably too much for RH.. They'll probably continue to support it on older installations for years to come, until they get their customer based moved to Stratis. HOWEVER, Stratis, which is an improved disk mapper, isn't even close to being finished or production ready, but they'll probably begin cooking it in Fedora 29. Oracle still needs Btrfs and has been using RH as the basis of their Linux distro, and RH doing the switch to Stratis may be a stratigic move not related to file system management because it may force Oracle to switch their distro base away from RH, if RH patents those parts that it adds to the open source Stratis.

SUSE, on the other hand, has invested heavily in Btrfs and is even deploying it to their customer base, which involves thousands of companies and hundreds of millions of dollars. So, I don't think they'd be putting themselves at risk if Btrfs wasn't up to the task. And, SUSE is responsible for considerably MORE development than RH contributed to Btrfs.

Snapshots are taken and, I assume, they can be restored just as easily. I'll continue my study of BTRFS and start warming up to it. At this point, I think I'll continue using ext4 on my 14.04LTS install. I assume switching a FS on an operational OS mean reinstalling the OS, is that correct?
....

A snapshot of / takes one second. Ditto for /home. Rolling back to a snapshot takes all of 3 minutes or so. Using Btrfs to send & recieve an ro snapshot to an external drive can take 15 minutes for @snapshot and 20+ minutes for @homesnapshot. However, doing a differential storage to an external drive for the same two snapshots can take a couple minutes for @snapshot and 3 or 4 minutes for @homesnapshot, depending on the total size of those two snapshots. The total size of my system is about 130Gb, with @ takeing about 30Gb and @home the rest. My last differential backup tool less than a minute for @ and about 2 minutes for @home, but those times depend entirely on the difference between the previous snapshot the the current one.

Yes, switching to EXT4 would require a reinstall. If you want to continue experimenting with Btrfs in order to become familiar with it you can boot a LiveUSB and then insert another 128Gb USB stick and install Bionic on it. Then you could boot it and play with it, using a second USB stick just formatted with Btrfs as a backup storage medium. You won't be touching your main system because you won't be booting from your internal HD.

[mhumm2]

Wow. You're a wealth of information. So Oshunlvr is the BTRFS guru; good to know. It sounds like BTRFS is worth checking out and installing for my main computer SSD for 18.04LTS. Thank you so much for the guidance and direction.

[GreyGeek]

My pleasure. Personally, I will never use a distro which does not offer Btrfs as the root filesystem during the install. In the future ZFS *may* be offered as a root filesystem on Kubuntu IF they can overcome the licensing issues. Even if they do, ZFS is RAM intensive and running it with less than 32GB of RAM won't be satisfactory.