Hmmm. That was a strange journey for a couple of days since I received my Pioneer Box.
First issue:
I noticed that my FreedobBox was disappearing from the local network during the night.
It’s been still somewhat working because I could see the LEDs working, but I needed to restart it by unplugging the power cord and plugging it in again.
And only after such a hard reboot, I was able to ping it and access it through SSH.
So I was wondering if I could try checking the logs to figure out what is happening during the night.
The journalctl didn’t say much. It was even lacking the whole 2-3 day worth of history.
I tried looking into /var/logs/syslog, but it wasn’t there. So, with the help of ChatGPT, I managed to install and set the rsyslog running and decided to look into the logs the next day…
Issue number two:
Meanwhile, I wanted to pimp up my SSH access a bit. I have always been a fan of the fish shell so I installed it.
But changing the shell was also not that obvious. I didn’t understand why, but I couldn’t see my username entry in /etc/passwd. (It was far too late when I realised that there’s LDAP setup in the Freedombox)
I tried doing it the hard way and I manually added my username entry into the /etc/passwd… and this broke a lot!
- I don’t have access through SSH anymore
- I can’t login to Cockpit (“Permission denied”)
- I only can still access
plinthweb interface, but can’t even add new users as there are some errors showing up…
Questions:
- is there a way to hard reset the box to the starting point where I could set everything up again?
- what could have been the network drop issue in the first place?