Cannot Connect to Server (Need Help Troubleshooting)


Tiller

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I was out of town over the weekend and at some point a power outage happened at the house. It must have lasted long enough that my battery backup also went down because I came home to the Main Menu screen in the Web UI saying there had been an unclean shutdown and when I started the array then a parity check would be performed. Okay, fine, no problem.

 

About four or five hours into the parity check, I lost connection to the server. I can't view any share folders through Windows trying to view a network location. I can't connect to the Web UI. Pinging tells me the destination host is unreachable. I left it alone overnight in the hopes that somehow the parity check was still going on and maybe it would allow me to connect when it finished. That was over 24 hours ago, and for my system the check usually takes about 18 hours. Still can't connect and pinging gives me nothing even though the server is still powered on.

 

After some Google searches, I am worried maybe my flash drive is failing or has failed but I'm not sure how to check it. Should I just press the power button on my server to force a shutdown and then try plugging the flash drive into my Windows PC?  Or am I way off base and is there something else I should try or check first?

 

Any help or guidance would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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Connect up a monitor and keyboard to the server.  Then see if you have a login prompt.  IF you do, log in and type:

diagnostics

That will save the Diagnostics file to the   logs   folder/directory of your flash drive. 

 

Then type:

poweroff

That should shut the server down and you can remove the flash drive so you can plug it into your PC. Now upload the entire Diagnostics file with your next post.

 

IF neither of these works, you can try a one-second push of the power button.  That should do a normal shutdown.   If that should fail, you can push the power button until a shutdown is forced.  (This will be an another unclean shutdown...)

 

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I hooked up a keyboard and monitor while the server was still on, but the display said there was no signal. So I couldn't even attempt to enter any commands. One second push of the power button didn't do anything, so I held to force the shutdown. I turned the server back on. So far, it seems like it has booted up normally. Like you said, it was an unclean shutdown so another parity check will be required when I start the array. Which I won't do yet until someone can look over the attached diagnostics and I can see if I will just have the same problem again.

 

When I booted up, there was a notification saying the parity check ended at around 4 hours with 0 errors. But obviously it didn't actually finish in that short of a time span and when it says it ended is when I lost connection with the server last night.

 

Like I said, I've attached the diagnostics. I also went ahead and made a new backup of the flash drive with the hope that the config directory is good at least. We'll see.

tower-diagnostics-20211012-1956.zip

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I looked at your Diagnostics file and didn't find any error messages in it.  But that was not surprising as it came after a reboot of the server. 

 

I did notice that the SMART reports for the two drives (that I looked at) reported a max Temperature of 41C at some time in the life of each drive.  That is a bit higher than most of us would like to see. 

 

18 hours ago, Tiller said:

It must have lasted long enough that my battery backup also went down because I came home to the Main Menu screen in the Web UI saying there had been an unclean shutdown...

 

Describe your setup in a bit more detail.  Do you have a UPS for the server?   Does the server auto restart when power is restored?  (Not a really good idea by the way!) 

 

What I would suggest at this junction is to setup the Syslog Server.  (Use the Mirror to Flash Drive option since it should finish in less than a day.)  Directions for doing so can be found here:

 

     https://forums.unraid.net/topic/46802-faq-for-unraid-v6/page/2/?tab=comments#comment-781601

 

Then start the array which should start the Parity check.  IF it locks up, upload that syslog file.  I would really suspect that the parity check will finish without an error since it does not seem likely (from looking at the plugins.txt file in the diagnostics) that there was any disk activity at the time when the power finally failed.)   Now having said that, there a possibility that the outage was accompanied by a power surge which might have damaged some thing.

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