All-
I applied updates on my hipster workstation at my workplace today, and since
those updates I cannot get a login on the system, even when attempting a
single-user boot. I've tried selecting older boot environments (I have
several) and even those exhibit svc.startd errors and will not give me
single-user access.
I'm looking for advice and suggestions on how to potentially rescue the system.
In particular, if I boot off a recent hipster live USB, is it possible to
access the boot environment on my system's disks? I'm familiar (in theory)
with the idea of booting into an alternate boot environment and potentially
adding/removing/verifying packages using pkg's -R option, as described here:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/E21801/mount.html
but those docs seem to assume you're booting off an older (or newer) boot env
on the installed system, not some kind of a "rescue" live USB. Is there a way
to make a Live hipster image see the boot environments from outside the live
image?
As far as the system, without being able to get a root prompt I don't have much
info on what's going wrong or why it seems to impact multiple boot environments.
Prior to today's update, I had been running a boot environment created in mid
April 2025, without any issues.
Today I decided I was overdue for updates, so I did a "pkg update -v". Note
that I did the "pkg update -v" in an ssh terminal window rather than from the
console, and I did get disconnected at the very end of the process. However, I
logged back in and checked the command output that I had tee'd to a file and it
indicated it had finished and was ready for a reboot.
When I boot the env created today, it says it's illumos-e98d23eb02. It *does*
boot, though it's really, really slow. It never gets to multi-user mode,
though, it just outputs messages about
svc.startd[9]: svc:/network/location:default: Method or service exit timed
out. Killing contract 33
If I force power off the system and then enable "verbose" and "single-user"
mode via the boot options, the next boot does say that it is
Booting to milestone "milestone/single-user:default".
but there's a lengthy pause (5-10 minutes) before it outputs
Hostname: <workstation hostname>
and then another lengthy pause (several minutes) before it starts outputting
the svc.startd messages again. I tried waiting about 20-25 minutes and it
never got to the point where I could get a prompt.
As I said above, even if I select the formerly working boot env from April or
the previous one from December 2024, the behavior is similar. It boots, but
very slowly, but svc.startd just repeatedly outputs Method or service timeout
errors. The boot env from December 2024 has failure messages from
svc:/system/identity:node instead of svc:/network/location:default , but the
behavior is otherwise the same.
I do have system backups so the most data I would lose is a day, but I'm really
not prepared (time-wise or procedure-wise) to rebuild the system from scratch,
so rescuing it (if possible) is much preferred.
Any suggestions for debugging the issue and/or recovery would be greatly
appreciated.
Thanks,
Tim
--
Tim Mooney [email protected]
Enterprise Computing & Infrastructure 701-231-1076 (Voice)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164
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