Skip to main content

Embedded Linux won't reboot - how to fix and repair

I have a lot of embedded systems running in our lab or in my home, all of them either as Raspberries or selfmade PCB with Yocto. Sometimes I can't reboot some systems, I think its the journald which causes some issues with SSD Cards, the error-message usually is:
Failed to open /dev/initctl

Anyhow, if you have this issue - a reboot can be force-forced:
systemctl --force --force reboot

Since a forced reboot does not sync the journal, the system typically comes up with a damaged FS. The remote fsck can be initiated by extending the command above with

sudo tune2fs -i 1m /dev/DISK && touch /forcefsck && systemctl --force --force reboot

(assumed you have access to a shell, via SSH or local access). When all goes fine, the system comes up with a clean FS. All this fuss comes from the SSD r/w actions, a well designed IoT embedded devices should have a flash mem part for the running OS.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Deal with corrupted messages in Apache Kafka

Under some strange circumstances it can happen that a message in a Kafka topic is corrupted. This happens often by using 3rd party frameworks together with Kafka. Additionally, Kafka < 0.9 has no lock at Log.read() at the consumer read level, but has a lock on Log.write(). This can cause a rare race condition, as described in KAKFA-2477 [1]. Probably a log entry looks like: ERROR Error processing message, stopping consumer: (kafka.tools.ConsoleConsumer$) kafka.message.InvalidMessageException: Message is corrupt (stored crc = xxxxxxxxxx, computed crc = yyyyyyyyyy Kafka-Tools Kafka stores the offset of every consumer in Zookeeper. To read out the offsets, Kafka provides handy tools [2]. But also zkCli.sh can be used, at least to display the consumer and the stored offsets. First we need to find the consumer for a topic (> Kafka 0.9): bin/kafka-consumer-groups.sh --zookeeper management01:2181 --describe --group test Prior to Kafka 0.9 the only possibility to get this i

Hive query shows ERROR "too many counters"

A hive job face the odd " Too many counters:"  like Ended Job = job_xxxxxx with exception 'org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.counters.LimitExceededException(Too many counters: 201 max=200)' FAILED: Execution Error, return code 1 from org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.exec.MapRedTask Intercepting System.exit(1) These happens when operators are used in queries ( Hive Operators ). Hive creates 4 counters per operator, max upto 1000, plus a few additional counters like file read/write, partitions and tables. Hence the number of counter required is going to be dependent upon the query.  To avoid such exception, configure " mapreduce.job.counters.max " in mapreduce-site.xml to a value above 1000. Hive will fail when he is hitting the 1k counts, but other MR jobs not. A number around 1120 should be a good choice. Using " EXPLAIN EXTENDED " and " grep -ri operators | wc -l " print out the used numbers of operators. Use this value to tweak the MR s

Life hacks for your startup with OpenAI and Bard prompts

OpenAI and Bard   are the most used GenAI tools today; the first one has a massive Microsoft investment, and the other one is an experiment from Google. But did you know that you can also use them to optimize and hack your startup? Even creating pitch scripts, sales emails, and elevator pitches with one (or both) of them helps you not only save time but also validate your marketing and wording. Curios? Here a few prompt hacks for startups to create / improve / validate buyer personas, your startups mission / vision statements, and USP definitions. Introduce yourself and your startup Introduce yourself, your startup, your website, your idea, your position, and in a few words what you are doing to the chatbot: Prompt : I'm NAME and our startup NAME, with website URL, is doing WHATEVER. With PRODUCT NAME, we aim to change or disrupt INDUSTRY. Bard is able to pull information from your website. I'm not sure if ChatGPT can do that, though. But nevertheless, now you have laid a grea