Appliance fails to boot after power outage
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Contents |
Overview
This article describes how to recover from an unclean shut down of a PINsafe appliance. An unclean shut down can occur as a result of a power outage.
Symptoms
The symptom of failing to boot can include prevention of startup, due to an fsck disk check request. It can also include a very rapid (abnormal) boot sequence which leads to a prompt where you are asked for a root password.
In both instances you need to follow the instructions below to perform an fsck of the partitions.
Solution
Our recommended method for performing a fsck is by downloading the free sysrescuecd.
This can be obtained from http://www.sysresccd.org
You do not need a root password using this method. Its also a requirement that the filesystem is not mounted by the operating systems when you scan it.
Once you've downloaded and burnt to disc (or mounted the ISO file as a CD if using vmware) you can boot from the disc and run fsck from there.
The commands to run once you get to the command line of sysrescuecd are:
fsck /dev/sdX1 -y fsck /dev/sdX2 -y fsck /dev/sdX3 -y fsck /dev/sdX4 -y fsck /dev/sdX5 -y fsck /dev/sdX6 -y
Please Note: Constitute X with the actual device e.g /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdb1
Retrieving backups
Should the worst happen and the appliance is not recoverable, you can mount the backups directory to scp the contents from within it to a safe location:
mount /dev/sda2 /root/temp
An example scp command to retrieve the files would be:
scp /root/temp root@anothermachine:/home/admin
Where anothermachine is another linux machine with a username of root and a destination directory of /home/admin
If this doesn't work
If it's not possible to fix the problem with the sysrescuecd solution above, you should consider retrieving PINsafe backups (as mentioned in the solution) from your broken appliance and deploying them into a freshly deployed VM. If you have not retained the VM you downloaded from us you may need to contact your reseller for a reissue of the download.
Did you take a backup?
It's important to take backups for these occasions. Some other articles related to backup methods for the PINsafe appliance can be found here:
