Perazim - Thu, 2017/09/28 - 12:53

Trouble getting file server to boot from iso.

New to Turnkey. 

D/L iso image, burned to dvd and booted dvd. Selected demo mode. Boot starts. Hangs at "[3.094012] Switched to clocksource tsc".

If I select install mode, same results.

Borrowed another PC. Works fine on it.

First PC is a Asus M5A97 LE R2.0 with a AMD Phenom II 965 and 8GB ram. Runs debian and ubuntu fine.

Any ideas as to what is causing this?

 

Thanks,

 

Perazim

 

Forum: 
Support
Tags: 
kernel

Perazim - Fri, 2017/09/29 - 10:56

Did a "cat /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource" on the same hardware running ubuntu and recieved "tsc".

 

Checking available_coucksources yielded "tsc hpet acpi_pm".

 

So what's up here?

Perazim - Fri, 2017/09/29 - 10:59

Must be something bad happening after setting the clocksource that produces no error message.

 

Perazim - Fri, 2017/09/29 - 15:28

As there are no checksums, at least that I can find, I downloaded a second copy of the file server and checked it again the first, no diferences so it is not a corrupted download.

 

Next, I downloaded the core system and tried that. Exactly same results as the file server.

 

 

Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Mon, 2017/10/02 - 01:51
Sounds like you've been busy over the weekend!

When you say it "runs Debian fine", have you explicitly tried installing Debian Jessie?

TurnKey Core (our base appliance - what all the others are built on) is built with Debian packages, so is essentially just Debian with a custom package set and a few homegrown packages pre-installed. Some of the other appliances also have third party software pre-installed.

We just use the default Debian kernel. But we do provide a custom installer (actually it's just a wrapper for the default Debian installer) and unlike Debian we provide an initramfs at boot time (like Ubuntu does; actually we robbed the code from Ubuntu). So you could argue that our installer is almost a hybrid of what Debian and Ubuntu do.

Your issue sounds like something to do with the kernel, however, as I say, we only use a default Debian kernel, so if Debian Jessie boots, so should TurnKey. TBH, I have no idea why it's not working for you?!

FWIW, TurnKey is primarily designed to be run as a VM. Hardware support is not one of TurnKey's strong suits. Whilst it theoretically should be possible to install it on any Debian Jessie supported hardware; it's mostly used as a VM. So that means we occasionally come across weird hardware issues such as you describe. So another option may be to install a hypervisor instead and then run TurnKey as a VM?

Personally I never run TurnKey on bare metal. TurnKey is really lightweight and it just seems like such a waste of hardware resources! Personally, I'd install a hypervisor (i.e. a minimalist OS, designed to be a host for VMs). My personal favourite is Proxmox. It's also Debian based, but as a hypervisor, is primarily intended to be installed to bare metal (the opposite of TurnKey). Up until about a year ago, I had Proxmox running on a 7 year old desktop and was running about 10 TurnKey server containers and some VMs on it. The only reason why I replaced it was I was running out of RAM (it was maxed out at 8GB)

If you go that way, you can run TurnKey (and/or any other OS you want to play with) on top as a VM or an LXC container. Actually, you can download TurnKey LXC containers direct from within the Proxmox web UI.

FWIW, if you haven't played with LXC containers before, they're pretty cool. They are sort of like a VM, but they leverage the host's kernel (so only Linux is supported). This means that they are crazy light weight. LXC containers run just like native bare metal, in context of the resources you give it. An LXC container loses WRT checksums, not only are there checksums, but they are signed too! Please see the doc page. (FWIW, Proxmox automatically checks all that when it downloads the container) :)

Perazim - Mon, 2017/10/02 - 13:02

Thanks for the reply.

 

I have installed Debian Jessie 8.9.0 amd64, Debian Stretch 9.1.0 amd64 and Ubuntu 16.04.3 amd64. No issues booting any of these.

 

Before I switched to Debian a while ago I was a redhat user and used the kvm. I will give your suggestion a try and let you know.

 

I did find the checksums. Must have had some kind of filter operating when I first looked.

 

Thanks,

Perazim

 

Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Tue, 2017/10/03 - 00:39
As I probably already mentioned, the current TurnKey build (v14.2) is based on Debian Jessie (aka 8.x). So if Debian Jessie (you mention 8.9.0) installs ok, then it must be something with our installer (di-live) causing issues?!

We're currently looking into rebasing on the default Debian installer for our next release. If that is viable for us, then hopefully we'll be doing that for v15.0 (which will be based on Debian Stretch aka 9.x).

Unfortunately, until then, a workaround, such as Proxmox will be your best option. Sorry I don't have better news.

Perazim - Wed, 2017/10/04 - 10:20

It has been my experience throughout life that the really nasty problems many times are two or more individual problems working together. A good example are airplane crashes. Multiple backup systems including the pilot need to fail for the plance to go down.

 

I downloaded Proxmox and burned it to dvd. The bios booted it and it provided some more info: the sp5100_tco (watchdog driver) produced a I/O error because of address already in use. I traced that to my display driver and this is not what is causing the no boot. Just to be sure, I will replace it with a generic vga card.

 

After this error, Prtoxmox producted several Searching for CDROM messages and finally gave up with No CDROM Found error. My DVD/CD is a sata DVD in a external enclosure connected via a usb-2 to the mainboard. The mainboard bios did boot the dvd from this drive but this same drive cannot be found by the Proxmox installer which itself was loaded from this same drive.

 

Next I used a USB stick to copy the Proxmox iso image to it and then booted it. This time I was able to get Proxmox installed.

 

This caused me to remember how I installed the different versions of Debian and Ubuntu listed previously, usb or dvd?

 

I have run out of time today but will get back to this to test all variations and let you know.

 

When might you produce the next release using Debian 9? This is my preferred version for now. I would be happy to test your next installer on all my hardware for you .

 

Perazim

 

 

 

Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Wed, 2017/10/04 - 11:26
Ah so it sounds like the issue wasn't the error that was showing... Tricky!

FWIW, the TurnKey ISOs are "hybrid" so should install from USB fine (just dd the ISO to it or use whatever tool you prefer). So perhaps it's worth trying it that way if you're still keen for a hardware install?

Personally, I still think Proxmox is the best option. Even if you only have one primary intention for your server, having the ability to separate out services and/or have redundancy is pretty handy in my experience.

It still hasn't been decided if we'll swap to the Debian default. Personally, it's my preference, but it's not just up to me. We're currently trying to work out how much work will be involved and how long it will likely take (i.e. how much it's going to cost us in time and/or money). So while in development, v15.0 will continue to use the current installer.

Thanks for being so willing to help out with testing though. I'll try to hold you to that regardless! :)

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