jebusfreek666 Posted January 5, 2020 Share Posted January 5, 2020 Ok, let me tell you guys what is going on. I am pretty sure that there is nothing that I can do in my current set up, but I would like to know if any of you have ideas. Here is what I did today. I am in the process of upgrading my drives, but before doing this I was doing a little housekeeping with the server. I made sure all my duplicati's were up to date, I updated all my dockers and plugins, and I ran a parity check to make sure all was well. I then updated to os 6.8 from 6.7. When all of this checked out, I restarted the server, and made sure everything was good. Becasue I was planning on changing over my drives I took the array offline, changed the setting to not auto start, and then restrated to make sure it would come back up with the array down. It did. So I powered down and cracked open the case. At this point, I wanted to change the location of some of my drives. So I moved a couple around, and they are now plugged in with the power cords and sata cables that were in the original positions. So all I have really done is changed some cabling. I did take a cheap 3 drive rack out of the top 2 5.25" slots and replace it with a hot swap icydock. One of the drives that was origianally in the cheap rack is now in the main tower rack, and one that was in the tower is now in the hot swap. But that is pretty much all I have done. I now attempted to restart the tower, just to veryify everything was ok before I started changing drives. It usually takes about 10 minutes or so for unraid to come up in my web ui (mostly due to the lsi controller I think), but I waited over 30 minutes and still nothing will come up. Here is my biggest dilema, I know i probably need to hook up a monitor and keyboard, but at this time I do not have access to either. I have never setup or run ssh in my life, so that seems like it might be a hill I can not climb at the moment. I do not have a windows computer currently running. All I have at the moment is my chromebook and my tower. When I restart the tower, it sounds just like it always does. I get the same beeps as usual (i think they are memory checks?), all the fans kick in like usual. Actually, I have heard the fans changing speeds so there is something going on at least. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. Even the icydock I installed has all green lights for the 3 bays. there is no activity, but since I had the array offline, I wouldn't expect any anyways. Any thoughts on how to proceed. I am in the process of texting people to see if I can borrow an old monitor and keyboard. But failing that, is there anything I can do at the moment? Quote Link to comment
trurl Posted January 5, 2020 Share Posted January 5, 2020 It's possible your BIOS decided to "help" you out when you changed disks around, and it is trying to boot from those disks now instead of from the Unraid flash. Does your router see the server? Can you ping it? You will probably have to get the monitor and keyboard to see what is happening during boot. Quote Link to comment
jebusfreek666 Posted January 5, 2020 Author Share Posted January 5, 2020 1 minute ago, trurl said: It's possible your BIOS decided to "help" you out when you changed disks around, and it is trying to boot from those disks now instead of from the Unraid flash. Does your router see the server? Can you ping it? You will probably have to get the monitor and keyboard to see what is happening during boot. As far as I can tell the router does not see it, though there is activity with the light on the server nic. And pinging comes back with destination host unreachable. Quote Link to comment
trurl Posted January 5, 2020 Share Posted January 5, 2020 My bet is on the BIOS deciding to boot from one of your "new" hard drives. Quote Link to comment
jebusfreek666 Posted January 5, 2020 Author Share Posted January 5, 2020 Ok. Thanks. That is kind of what I figured. Off to Walmart to buy a monitor. Quote Link to comment
jebusfreek666 Posted January 5, 2020 Author Share Posted January 5, 2020 (edited) 3 hours ago, trurl said: My bet is on the BIOS deciding to boot from one of your "new" hard drives. Ok, so it is not in incorrect boot order that is the issue. I added a keyboard and monitor and it goes through the normal boot process. Then it comes to the point where it asks me to select a user and input a password. I do this, and it goes to the "root@tower:#" line. It still does not let me access the web ui at that point. No idea where to go from here. I have restarted and tried running in gui mode, and it logs right into the interface. But web ui will not come up. Is there a way to restart it in the regular gui mode? Edit: Ok, nevermind. I am an idiot and I just wasted soooo much time. I apparently had the ethernet cable plugged into the incorrect port. I think it is the impi port, though I am not entirely sure that is what it is (or what it does for that matter). Plugged it in one of the NICs, and like magic it all works. I hate myself so much right now. Edited January 5, 2020 by jebusfreek666 1 Quote Link to comment
jebusfreek666 Posted January 5, 2020 Author Share Posted January 5, 2020 8 minutes ago, BRiT said: Type the following at the root@tower:# prompt, diagnostics That should produce a zip file full of info for others to troubleshoot. Then you'll likely have to shutdown in order to put your flash drive on another system so you can upload that diagnostic.zip file it produced to your next post. Thanks for the attempt, but you can't fix stupid! See my above edit! Make me feel like such an ass after all the phone calls from family members becasue I am the "tech guy" in the family, and I told them to check the plugs..... Quote Link to comment
itimpi Posted January 5, 2020 Share Posted January 5, 2020 1 hour ago, jebusfreek666 said: Ok, nevermind. I am an idiot and I just wasted soooo much time. I apparently had the ethernet cable plugged into the incorrect port. I think it is the impi port, though I am not entirely sure that is what it is (or what it does for that matter). Plugged it in one of the NICs, and like magic it all works. I hate myself so much right now. I do not think you mentioned that your server had IPMI support? With that it is possible to see the boot sequence (and access BIOS settings) without an attached keyboard or monitor. If IPMI stops working then barring catastrophic failure of the motherboard not having the network cable plugged into the IPMI port would be the obvious thing to check first. Having said that do you normally even have a ethernet cable plugged into the IPMI port AND one plugged into the normal network port? Your comment makes it sound as if this may not be the case? It would be shame to have an IPMI capable motherboard and not be exploiting this feature. Quote Link to comment
jebusfreek666 Posted January 5, 2020 Author Share Posted January 5, 2020 21 minutes ago, itimpi said: I do not think you mentioned that your server had IPMI support? With that it is possible to see the boot sequence (and access BIOS settings) without an attached keyboard or monitor. If IPMI stops working then barring catastrophic failure of the motherboard not having the network cable plugged into the IPMI port would be the obvious thing to check first. Having said that do you normally even have a ethernet cable plugged into the IPMI port AND one plugged into the normal network port? Your comment makes it sound as if this may not be the case? It would be shame to have an IPMI capable motherboard and not be exploiting this feature. I do not usually have anything plugged into the ipmi port. Like I had said, I don't fully understand what it is. I get that it is for plugging in for diagnostics (which I also could not have done, as I had no other computer besides a chromebook available at the time), but the vast majority of the time I just have my tower tucked away and use the webgui. To be honest, I mostly use the server for media storage and plex. I have been getting into checking out other things, and building the system was a slow learning process for me as well (it is the first system I have ever built). But before all of this, I had never even seen a linux system before. But if you have suggestions, or links to things I could do with IPMI that I am not doing now, I am always up for learning more! Quote Link to comment
itimpi Posted January 5, 2020 Share Posted January 5, 2020 IPMI is nothing to with Linux, and is purely a motherboard feature. What it allows you to do is simulate a directly attached keyboard+monitor over a network link (as well as do other things). This is commonly used on servers that are running headless to avoid the need to physically access them. You could try googling IPMI for more detail. As to whether your Chromebook is capable of running an IPMI client I have no idea, but I would think there is a good chance you can. I know for instance I could do so on both my iPhone or iPad. Quote Link to comment
jebusfreek666 Posted January 5, 2020 Author Share Posted January 5, 2020 1 minute ago, itimpi said: As to whether your Chromebook is capable of running an IPMI client I have no idea, but I would think there is a good chance you can. I know for instance I could do so on both my iPhone or iPad. Well that is cool. Did not realize that at all. I assume you must have to have a some kind of ethernet to iphone cable adapter? Or does ipmi connect to the router and then you connect to a different ip address? Like I said, I have no idea about the in depth technical stuff. And most of what I read after googling is either someone trying to sell software, or seems way over my head. Quote Link to comment
itimpi Posted January 5, 2020 Share Posted January 5, 2020 1 minute ago, jebusfreek666 said: Well that is cool. Did not realize that at all. I assume you must have to have a some kind of ethernet to iphone cable adapter? Or does ipmi connect to the router and then you connect to a different ip address? Like I said, I have no idea about the in depth technical stuff. And most of what I read after googling is either someone trying to sell software, or seems way over my head. With IPMI you run a second ethernet cable to the router and the IPMI connection will have its own IP address. You can then use any client that can make an ethernet connection via the router (in my case via a WiFi connection from my iPhone/iPad) I would suggest looking up IPMI on wikipedia may be a good place to start if google is not giving pertinent results. Quote Link to comment
jebusfreek666 Posted January 5, 2020 Author Share Posted January 5, 2020 Just now, itimpi said: With IPMI you run a second ethernet cable to the router and the IPMI connection will have its own IP address. You can then use any client that can make an ethernet connection via the router (in my case via a WiFi connection from my iPhone/iPad) I would suggest looking up IPMI on wikipedia may be a good place to start if google is not giving pertinent results. That is excellent. Thank you so much! I will be researching and setting this up as soon as the disk coversion project is complete. Quote Link to comment
itimpi Posted January 5, 2020 Share Posted January 5, 2020 5 minutes ago, jebusfreek666 said: That is excellent. Thank you so much! I will be researching and setting this up as soon as the disk coversion project is complete. You might as well take advantage of a feature that tends to only be found on server class motherboards when you think of it servers hosted in data centres are a classic case where the administrators might be remote to the server so it is very advantageous to be able to do remotely functions that otherwise require you to physically go to the server and use an attached keyboard -monitor. Quote Link to comment
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