Ubuntu does not start after update.

Richard G

Richard G

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It's not really DA related, but a friend of mine has an Ubuntu 18.04 server.
Last night he just did a apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and everything was working find. There was a notice that there was a new grub and if he wanted to use that or keep the current for the moment. He choose the latter. Then dan update went 4 grub lines updates also gave OK, not a single error.

So just to be sure after updating, he rebooted the server. But the server did not came back up anymore.
Looks like the server is starting in single user mode when the datacenter starts it, or at least then a ping reply appears. On a normal boot, there will never be a ping reply.
Server is reachable via vKVM, I had a look in the syslog for him, but I can't find anything wrong.
Had a look at /boot/grub but there is only 1 kernel and grub and stuff (in Centos at least 3). Probably grub2 is used or no grub at all because the system contains 16 TB in raid 1.

I normally only work with Centos myself and not with Ubuntu. It's odd anyway that the system does not boot into the os after a simple upgrade via apt-get.

Anybody had the same problem? Or a clue on where (how) to look, or how to fix this?
My friend does not have any knowledg at all, so I would like to help him.
 
Thank you Brent.
I didn't found that one because it was not a grub issue, it was a network issue mainly. I found others and it was some bug in a specific update found more people having that issue, but couldn't repair it. Same happened on the vps systems.
Happened 2 times on the same server after the same update. We decided to install 16.x instead and had no issues at all anymore.

Problem was network went down too because network wasn't loaded anymore we could reach it via KVM but could not update, get or do anything which had to do with internet because network card would not start in KVM either.
Only managed to get the VPS'ses fixed, because they had older kernels present, so we could go back to the older ones. The server was a new install and no older kernel except for the kernel present on installation which for some reason could also not be loaded anymore.
As far as I know, it was fixed in the next kernel update.

It was also not DA stuff, but I thought maybe somebody here had experienced the same. ;)

Thank you anyway.
 
Richard G said:
Thank you Brent.
I didn't found that one because it was not a grub issue, it was a network issue mainly. I found others and it was some bug in a specific update found more people having that issue, but couldn't repair it. Same happened on the vps systems.
Happened 2 times on the same server after the same update. We decided to install 16.x instead and had no issues at all anymore.

Problem was network went down too because network wasn't loaded anymore we could reach it via KVM but could not update, get or do anything which had to do with internet because network card would not start in KVM either.
Only managed to get the VPS'ses fixed, because they had older kernels present, so we could go back to the older ones. The server was a new install and no older kernel except for the kernel present on installation which for some reason could also not be loaded anymore.
As far as I know, it was fixed in the next kernel update.

It was also not DA stuff, but I thought maybe somebody here had experienced the same. ;)

Thank you anyway.
Click to expand...

Hi Richard ask the Hoster or their VPS virtual enviroment is compatible with the newer versions. ( Network and disk/grub).
( in rescue/recovery mode there is no network ... default on, is disabled )
(With CENTOS we had such kind of thing in the past. with kernel security bugs not starting vps)

"Er zijn na updates her en der wel niet booten en swap problemen"
 
Last edited:
Thank you ikkeben, but it was not an issue with their VPS virtual environment as this was both on a dedicate server and vps. It was really a kernel bug.
The newer 18.x updates/versions did not have issues anymore.
Also via the KVM the system started up nicely, only not network which was prevented by the kernel. On the VPS systems we were able to change back to the old kernel, then reboot, create the bugfix, do the update and then they started. But we needed internet for the bugfix.
Since the dedi did not start internet anymore and could'nt boot anymore into the older kernel, the only option was to reinstall them.

In that time I've searched the internet and found it was a bug. It was fastly fixed however, but this dedi was just installed and updated when that kernel was just released and so the update was able to crash it.

Server was with Hetzner and they have their environment in good order. ;)
 
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