Saturday 10 November 2007

nslu2 broken?

Thursday evening, when I came from work I found my nslu2 not working. It is/was a router and a local mirror. I tried to understand what's going on, but I couldn't. Everything looked fine, except that it did not resolve any addresses and the ping to my provider was not giving any results.

I tried to restart dnsmasq, although it seemed it was running fine, and then, in a desperate gesture (after trying to understand what was going on) I thought of restarting networking. I got locked on the outside and was forced to restart the system.

Everything looked to come back to normal. Since it was late, I set myself to investigate the next morning what happened. But yesterday morning, the network was again down and the slug was inaccessible.

Since the only way to restore sanity in such a situation (because I don't have a serial console on the slug) was to reset and hope for the best, I did that.


The slug didn't start anymore. It seemed to cycle through boot -> reset -> reboot. I tried to see what was going on and connected the hard disk to my laptop. The filesystem was clean, although /var/log/boot.0 was a directory (and that directory had the same content as /var/lib/dpkg/info). I manually removed that, but that didn't make the slug boot.


It seems my slug is kind of dead.

Now I would like to know if is there any way to do remotely what flash-kernel does from within debian.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

upslug2

Won't be much use with a corrupted root filesystem though.

-- Joey Hess

Anonymous said...

I once had similar troubles. Slug was running but did not respond to ping or anything. A reboot did not help. I reinstalled it with upslug2. It should be possible to flash a new kernel via upslug2 also.

eddyp said...

upslug2

Won't be much use with a corrupted root filesystem though.


Well the filesystem is now ok.

I guess I'll need the initrd and the image, right?