Headless Pi is not connecting to router anymore after reboot

BryanFRitt

Headless Orange Pi Plus is not connecting to router anymore after a reboot. There's a red light on like it has power. The I thought I might have the ethernet cable lights on the Pi blink once after it quick connecting after the problem started(not sure), but I haven't seen the ethernet light blink any more. If I take out the microSD card, the Pi will connect to the router, but what can I do with it without a microSD card? If I put the microSD card back it, won't connect to the router anymore. Guessing what's messed up is either the microSD card reader or the  software. I don't remember messing with anything that might stop the Pi from connecting to router. I have/had Raspbian installed on the Pi.

Ideas on what I can do to fix it?

Things I've tried(not in any order):

I've tried waiting a lot time.

Unplugging, then taking out the microSD card, putting it back, the rebooting.

Switching the ethernet wire with another known good one. (double checking it's fully plunged in)

Turning off MAC filtering on the router.

Taking out the microSD, and seeing that the computer reads it. (it does). [question: What does in look like when the microSD card is properly inserted into the mircoSD slot.(as a double check)]

Pressing the power and/or the upgrade buttons on the Pi.

dx.l

Once I have Armbian on sd card, and one day it just put the system to emergency mode when i reboot it, with no ethernet on.
I think it's can be your case.
The stupid SystemD - must die.

Now I'm using Slackware as headless server installed on mmc (thanx to Mara) - without any problems. It's work stable.

Create another sd card installation and try to boot with another card.

BryanFRitt

Just tried a new image, on a new microSD card(this time Debian Jessie XFCE instead of Raspberrian); appeared to have the same issues.
I also tried borrowing a HDMI display for a bit. The on board one showed android(?Chinese?), but when started with a microSD card showed nothing, not even an error message. I didn't get to try the new MicroSD card with this display.
---
UPDATE: I found a USB togo to USB converter and hooked up a microSD card reader to it and now the Pi will at least connect to the router, but when I try to ssh into it I get a 'Connection refused' message. I can `ping` the Pi and get that it's there, from the Pi with either microSD card in this setup. ... but is this going from the emmc instead of the microSD?

Now I've forgotten how to initially setup the headless Pi.

BryanFRitt

Ok... those images didn't work, so I went back and installed Raspbian_For_OrangePiplus_v0_8_0.img on it, and that worked.

Is there an easy way to restore what I had done with the old microSD onto the new microSD, or use the new microSD to fix whatever happened to he old microSD?

chroot ? copy/paste ?

BryanFRitt

I can `chroot` into the old microSD using the new microSD on the Pi, but I don't know what to do there, or how to find the issue/fix it.
[abbreviated descriptions of some things I've tried]
I've tried `dpkg --get-selection > File.txt` outside chroot,  `dpkg --set-selections < File.txt` inside chroot, `apt-get dist-upgrade`...
I've ran `apt-get update && apt-get upgrade` from the `chroot`, didn't fix anything.

BryanFRitt

[Note: perhaps not the best way to do this]
Expanded the partition size of the new microSD card.
Made a backup of the the files from the old microSD that I could via copy paste (skipping /var/cache/apt/archives, /dev, /lost+found, /tmp, .Trash, .Trash-1000, (and ?/run?))
Copied the backup files overriding the files one the new microSD card.
Things seem to work, at least for now. No ideas as to what happened/why this fixed it.

BryanFRitt

, it happened again... on reboot ssh 'ing into quit working. This time the webpage was still being served. Don't know what I did to get ssh working on it again, but I got it working for a little bit. But then I tried to get TightVNC working again, and now ssh just times out. (the hosted webpage still works). In trying to get TightVNC working I was messing with "Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1" errors, never got it fixed, and now I can't even do much without ssh.

I have access to microSD card and can do things with it, any ideas?

Update:
Minutes after this post I found a .Xauthority in /lost+found and copied that to /root/.Xauthority, then rebooted the Pi, and now I can ssh and run TightVNC again.

p.s.
It's weird sometimes I give up trying on my on, and soon after asking for help, I end up fixing it myself, even if nobody replied.