Whether your FreedomBox is plugged into a router at home or not (if not, please specify how it is connected to the internet) - yes
The month and year you bought your kit (feel free to omit if you want to preserve some privacy, but this could be helpful information) - arrived last week from Olimex
The version of FreedomBox your are running (available by clicking on the “?” in the top menu → “About”) - I can’t get to that information, but assume it’s the latest as it just shipped
Problem: I wanted to restore a btrfs snapshot, so I went to plinth>system>snapshots and clicked on the box to restore the one I needed. There was a confirmation screen, which told me that the device would reboot. I continued, and the green light has gone off, but the red one was still on. I waited several hours and the system did not come back up (i.e. was not accessible by http/s, ssh or ping on it’s allocated IPv4 address).
I tried removing the external power supply, and reconnecting after 30 seconds: it still didn’t start. I then tried removing the power supply, opening the case and disconnecting the battery, waiting 30 seconds then reconnecting the battery and external power… still nothing.
I’ve read about the 3 buttons, but can’t access them as I’ve got the hard-drive tray attached and they’re completely covered by the SATA connector.
So… how do I get this thing back up? And what’s the recommended procedure for rebooting this system?
Hi Mark, would you share what the issue is that led you to snapshot restore?
If there is a change to the /boot partition which is vfat filesystem the snapshot won’t apply. Snapshots only cover the btrfs root filesystem. So I’m wondering if the issue is on /boot rather than something in /.
For example if I were to remove the kernel image or something from /boot, and then try to get that back using a snapshot the snapshot would not restore that file being that it is not on the btrfs filesystem.
On the Pioneer, it is ext2 usually, but as you wrote it is not covered by snapshots.
Which power supply are you using? The 5W 2A one provided by Olimex with their “OSHW server” version is insufficient, I had disk I/O failures (actually, even worse, the disk was unmounted and remounted with a different drive letter, while I was trying to use it) with it until I got a 5W 5A power supply (which I got somewhere else).
I had installed one of the applications (bepasty) and after trying it out, decided I wouldn’t use it and wanted to uninstall. I gather that uninstalling these packages is not as simple as “apt remove” so I tried to roll-back to an earlier snapshot.
The system was stable and there weren’t any other issues.
Good. Your /boot would be fine in this case. I believe you can uninstall in the app management page now. In the past there were some manual steps, but uninstall like you think it should today. Do it from the GUI next time.
Carry on with the others, I don’t have a Pioneer and can’t help much from here.
So far, I have never tried restoring any snapshot and I uninstalled a few apps and did not notice any issue, besides some things remaining from them.
I already did a complete reinstall and used backups to another computer to recover my data, it worked fine.
If I want to try some app without any risk of disturbing my freedombox, that is running postfix/dovecot and ejabberd, I install freedombox in a virtual machine on my computer and do it there. Of course this has limitations, but it allows to see how the app works and whether I feel like using it or not.
It sometimes happens (at most 2/3 times a year) that my freedombox seem to have stopped working (web interface and ssh not responding), in that case I remove the power, I take the microSD card out, put it in a microSD card reader on my computer and run fsck.ext2 on it, then I have a spare microSD card with a Debian system that I put in the Pioneer and I use btrfs check to check the btrfs file system on the external disk, and then I power off and put back the normal microSD card.
I have been doing this for maybe 3 years now, I have once some minor reparation of a file system and then I continued using the system, and once it was looking more significantly affected and then I decided to reinstall completely.
About the power supply: I detected the problem when I was connected to ssh and was trying a dd command with a file of several GB to be written to the external disk (I wasn’t running the freedombox software). The dd command was always interrupted at some point and I noticed that the external disk had changed device letter. Any try had exactly the same result. After changing the power supply, this never happened again.
So I suppose the problem may not occur in most circumstances but in some, it does, and since a 5W 5A power supply isn’t expensive and using one instead of a 5W 2A won’t harm, my suggestion would be to replace the power supply. Also other people reported similar problems that disappeared with a more powerful power supply.
I’ve just got hold of a microSD card reader, and there is no btrfs filesystem on the card. It seems that the “restore snapshot” function has instead erased the FS. Where should I log this bug please?