[Freedombox-discuss] HELP! The dist-upgrade bricked my FreedomBox and new images don't boot.

[A. F. Cano]

The dist-upgrade of a few days ago made the FreedomBox totally inaceessible.

Just tried to boot it on an old laptop and I get:

Grub loading...
Welcome to GRUB1

error symbol 'grub_disk_native_sectors' not found.
grub rescue>

What do I need to enter there? I can mount it on my desktop under /media,
but what can I do to recover the bootable status?

This was the latest attempt.  Before that I tried an old testing FreedomBox
from about a year ago.  It booted but needed massive upgrades.  I replaced
testing with trixie in /etc/apt/sources.list, did the modernization that
was called for and kept upgrading, but the upgrades kept using up more and
more memory, freezing it, making it inaccessible.  I kept cockpit running
to keep an eye on what was going on and upgrading via ssh.  After many
tries, it seemed that I was in the final round and the upgrade removed
network manager and everything froze.  Since then I haven't been able to
access that FreedomBox image.

Then I installed a brand new image on a brand new SD card.  Neither the
trixie imeage nor the testing image even appeared to boot.  I tried them
on a spare FreedomBox (apu2) from a computer with the interface manually
configured to appear as 10.42.0.3 since I read that a newly-installed
FreedomBox can be reached from a browser at 10.42.0.1.

Then I mounted it and manually copied the files I had saved a long time ago
into /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections:

FreedomBox WAN
FreedomBox LAN enp2s0
FreedomBox LAN enp3s0

This sets the IP addresses for the internal networks.  In the past, this
pre-configuration has allowed me to access a new FreedomBox from the
existing internal networks (192.168.200.x and 192.168.224.x), but I'm not
quite sure how those are interpreted on first boot.  In any case, it appears
that all these newly created FreedomBox images don't boot, not on the apu1d4
(the all-important main FreedomBox), not on the apu2 with the testing
computer at 10.42.0.3, and not on the laptop.  Even though the boot
subsystem on the latter recognizes a USB HD, if I select it, it boots the
OS on the HD, and the mouse doesn't work.

While it booted and was accessible, I tried many times to do a restore of
my user data.  I all cases it failed at the very end (the tar file was
about 3.6GN) and there was no file left to restore.  Maybe this was caused
by old versions of software, so I kept upgrading until the last attempt
bricked the whole thing by deleting network manager and somehow making it
unbootable.  This is the error: (when the upload failed)

 Proxy Error
 The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
 The proxy server could not handle the request

 Reason: Error reading from remote server

 Apache/2.4.58 (Debian) Server at fbx Port 443

This happened both with and without privoxy, so the proxy is at least
misleading.

As a side note, it would really be helpful if the documentation (at the
FreedomBox itself) specified the steps one must take at the host where the
remote backups are kept.  I had to install borg backup and then run the
commands (from a post I found)

$ borg list /path/to/backup

and then copy/paste the last backup into

$ borg export-tar /path/to/backup::"<name of backup>"

Even better would be if the FreedomBox did an ssh remote command of the
first one, presented the user with the output and allowed the selection of
a backup, that would then be put as part of the second command that would
also be remotely executed.

I then wiped the old testing FreedomBox and put brand new images on that SD
card (256 GB, the other 2 are 128).  Neither the stable nor testing images
seemed to boot.  arp-scan never detected any, in either the main network
(192.168.200.x) or the test network (10.42.0.x)

So, tried 2 separate SD cards one brand new and one that used to boot and
neither seems to now.  Tried testing and stable images on both networks
and neither are visible to arp-scan and of course are not accessible by
either IP or freedombox.local, as the manual says it should be.


For completeness, this is how I burned the images, just like the web page
says:

xz -d freedombox-trixie-amd64.img.xz
sudo dd bs=1M if=freedombox-trixie-amd64.img of=/dev/sdf conv=fdatasync status=progress

sudo ifconfig enp3s 10.42.0.3 (setting of the interface on the test computer)

What am I doing wrong? Why does nothing show on arp-scan? Why does nothing
appear to boot?  Why do the browsers keep saying "Unable to connect?  Even
when typing 10.42.0.1 or http://10.42.0.1 they all insist on https.

This is quite urgent, my whole network is out of commission.  Can anyone
suggest something to try or how to fix any of these issues?

Once I get the FreedomBox to its working state with all the data backed up,
I intend to keep an SD card plugged into my main computer and regularly do
a unison sync between the live, running FreedomBox and this backup, so the
backup is ready to go if the main one fails.  This was an absolute disaster.

Thanks for reading this far.  I eagerly await any suggestion.

Augustine