Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Avahi daemon failure

Collapse
This topic is closed.
X
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Avahi daemon failure

    Disclaimer: I'm a linux noob, so I'm capable of almost any elementary error to do with this stuff.

    Short version: Any network access freezes the console or desktop that attempts it. After login I get a KDE freeze showing nothing but the splash background. I have a boot failure with Avahi DNS daemon complaining that there are no files in /etc/avahi/services. What do I do now?

    Long version:
    I attempted an upgrade from Kubuntu Edgy to Feisty on Friday night, but it froze 13 minutes from completion and gave me an timeout error and froze. After the dist-upgrade log showed two "Nothing's happened for 240 seconds argh" type errors I killed the update manager. I tried to start up the adept manager again, but it was complaining that something else had a lock on the package interface.

    I tried kill -9ing stuff that had adept or apt in the name, but couldn't get the GUI interfaces to work. I tried entering "apt-get upgrade", and it complained and told me to enter a dpkg configure type command. So I did that, every time going back to apt-get upgrade and entering the command it told me to (There was another apt-get command with a -f switch, but I was mostly just doing what it told me to do).

    Eventually it told me it thought that it thought it was up to date and so I rebooted. The boot log (dunno what it's called, it has a list of boot devices and daemons with [ok] or [fail] next to them) shows a failure for "Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Daemon". The KDE login screen comes up but then freezes just showing the login wallpaper. If I switch to one of my other consoles any network commands freezes that console: ping, ifconfig, ip addr show, even sudo if I login as a non-root user. I've had a look in my network config file in /etc/networks, and it is the same as it was before the upgrade.

    I then logged into it again in recovery mode, and had a look at some logs in /var/logs. The following lines seem to be showing the symptoms:

    No service found in /etc/avahi/services [I've looked and this directory is empty]
    Can't open user face
    Internal error: memory corruption detected.

    Direct network access commands still freezes my shell in recovery mode.

    I downloaded the alternate install CD and I've updated all my packages from the CD, so it appears not to be a package issue.

    Now I could, of course, just kill the partition and reinstall feisty from scratch from the CD (which wouldn't be that awful for me), but I reckon I'll learn more by fixing this. I guess I need to get this avahi DNS daemon thingy working again. What's my best strategy for doing that? I guess I have to either reinstall some package or other, and put some files back in /etc/avahi/services.

    Thanks for any help you guys can give me. I imagine I made countless mistakes after the auto upgrade fubared, but I need to move forward from the current state.

    #2
    Re: Avahi daemon failure

    I'd try to re-install Avahi, e.g. by the console command sudo apt-get --reinstall install avahi-daemon

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Avahi daemon failure

      OK, I tried that, but the reinstall failed because it was unable to stop the currently running avahi-daemon process. I got an error message that a timer expired.

      I did a
      Code:
      ps -ef | grep avahi
      to list the running services and tried to kill -9 them, the kill command reports no errors, but the avahi processes are still there with the same PIDs, so I guess it didn't work.

      I suppose I could comment out a line in a boot script somewhere that is trying to start the avahi daemon, but I don't know where that would be.

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Avahi daemon failure

        Originally posted by DudleySmith
        I suppose I could comment out a line in a boot script somewhere that is trying to start the avahi daemon
        Disable the according script as a whole:

        Code:
        sudo mv /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon.ex

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Avahi daemon failure

          OK, I tried that. I had to rename the init.d script back again after the reboot and before the reinstall.

          However, I still got another error message. It appeared to install the package correctly, but then it restarted two processes. The second one was the Avahi process. It reported two error messages, saying that it timed out waiting for a return value from the process. When I do ps -ef | grep avahi, it says that the avahi-daemon is starting up.

          So it appears that the avahi-daemon is installed correctly, but something it is trying to talk to is not, and the daemon if freezing during its startup procedure.

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Avahi daemon failure

            Originally posted by DudleySmith
            So it appears that the avahi-daemon is installed correctly, but something it is trying to talk to is not, and the daemon if freezing during its startup procedure.
            In this case, a review of the according configuration file, i.e. /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf (et al.), might prove helpful.

            Comment


              #7
              Re: Avahi daemon failure

              Somebody at work came up with the answer. I have a Netgear WG311v2 PCI wireless LAN card. This card is supported natively with the acx driver. However, I have a WPA wireless network and the acx driver does not support wpa_supplicant. Hence, I removed the acx driver and set up ndiswrapper. However, I removed the acx driver in the "wrong" way (I followed some instructions I found on the ubuntu forums, which involved moving the acx folder and doing a depmod), and when I did a dist-upgrade, the driver was replaced. I have added "blacklist acx" to my /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file, and now all is well.

              Thanks a lot for your help, UnicornRider.

              Comment

              Working...
              X