On 12/7/23 17:06, gene heskett wrote:
I had a 3d slicer I was quitting to restart it and re-organish its
caxhe, took my machine to a lockup showing half a workspace on one half
the screen and half an adjacent workspace on the other half of the
screen, no responce to the keyboard and no mouse. 28 days uptime which
was better than most uptimes I have with bookworm. 2 weeks seems to be
the norm.
TL;DR:
So I went to the front panel and pressed the reset button but when it
came time to enter my pw, it just looped back to the login prompt. So I
did a full powerdown, enough times the psu finally went face down in the
pool. That was a good excuse to do an overdue D & C and some update
installs while I was changing the supply, adding a 16 port sata-III
controller and 8T worth of SSD's so I could use them to get amanda
started again. Powered it up, bios found the new drives, but my pw was
still rejected, it looped back to the login in 2 or 3 seconds.
A failing power supply can cause very strange behavior, including file
corruption that will haunt you after replacing the power supply.
I do not normally have a root pw set, just me, using sudo when I need to
do root stuff. So at grub I hit e and changed quiet to single,
eventually spotting in all the spew, something go flying by about the
root account being locked, so "single" does not work. And of course no
scrollback to read that msgs detail.
Thats bug #1. Single for rescue demands a root pw. If no root, it should
default to the name in the sudoers file. So I'm still locked out and
this is the 3rd time debian 12 has done this to me. So I get out a 12.2
net-install dvd and reboot to it, several times, but I was able to set a
root pw so single worked but I still had to enter the new pw.
While I always set a root password, I do agree that people should be
able to run Debian without a root password and everything should still
work. Perhaps you should consider filing a bug report against grub (?).
At this point I successfully changed /my/ passwd to something a bit
longer expressing my frustration. So since all my other machine control
machines have a full desktop with full net access, I went to one of the
bananapi-m5's and sent firefox to google with the search string "linux
login loops back to login", 2nd hit, on stackexchange said to delete
anything that looked like ./XAuthority* and ditto ./xsession* something
was contaminated, killing x or its newer wayland cousin. Bingo! Next
reboot was normal.
So that is bug #3. Deleting that stuff, possibly losing some setup
details by then re-starting X (etc) with a clean slate is far more
preferable to another format and reinstall just to delete the
contaminated files, formatting everything and losing 25 years of my
history like happened when those 2 new 2T seacrates died at about 6
weeks runtime, within hours of each other a bit over a year ago.
Seems to me stuff like this ought to be fixable.
Many thanks for reading this far. Maybe someone with write perms on
bugzilla can investigate?
Cheers, Gene Heskett.
If I am understanding you correctly, $HOME/.Xauthority and/or
$HOME/.xsession-errors became corrupt when the PSU failed, and the fix
was to replace the PSU and delete those files? About the only idea that
comes to mind would be to put in a feature request against Xorg that
Xorg implement some automatic failure recovery protocol that includes
those files when Xorg fails to start the windowing environment.
That said, I have little faith in the "find the needle in the haystack"
and "put Humpty Dumpty back together again" approach to fixing operating
system instances. Even when it "seems to work", I rarely have
confidence in the results -- "what needles did I miss?" My response to
this situation is disaster preparedness -- I take images of my OS
drives monthly, or as needed. In fact, I had a UEFI Debian image go
sideways last weekend during maintenance. I spent ~15 minutes
investigating/ trouble-shooting/ STFW/ RTFM/ etc., could not find the
answer, spent ~15 minutes re-imaging, spent ~15 minutes updating, and
was back in business with a known good OS instance in less than an hour
without any outside help.
David
