Problems booting headless

Nicolas

I've installed OpenBSD on may up board connected to my TV (only standalone display I have) without any troubles.
As long as I've connected it to the TV it boots and gets it's ip address through dhcp and I can log in through ssh.

If I boot without the TV connected, it does not seem to boot to the point where the network is started... anyone an idea?

Didier

You don't seem to be sure about where the boot process halted (if it really halted) , So I have questions :
Haven't you tried to reconnect your TV to see possible error messages ?
Can't you plug a usb keyboard in your up-board and directly login, so that you can use commands like dmesg, ifconfig or netstat ?

It's a bit difficult to know what goes wrong without any information .

Nicolas

Sorry, I've should have mentioned, if I reconnect my TV afterwards I get "Video format not supported". So at the moment I have no idea how to find out what's going wrong...

Didier

Okay.
Try to log in to the machine on which the DHCP server is running. I guess it is the router you use to go on internet.
There, normally, you should be able to see the status of the connection between the up-board and the server.

Depending on the result, you can configure the interface statically.

Then, don't forget to use ping.

Kurt

I have install Ubuntu 16.04 so my setup may be different.

When I setup the Ubuntu to work Headless, I am using a wireless adapter. For the first boot (or two), I will boot up with a monitor. I do this so I can use the GUI to make the wireless connection. After I make the connection and it working.

By default the connection appears to only be setup for current user, so booting up without monitor and trying to PuTTy into it, will fail as the wifi connection has not been done.

I was able to solve this, by while still in the GUI, I click on the Wifi symbol on my machine toward upper right of the screen and click on menu item with a name, like Network Connections. I then select my wifi connection and then click on the Edit button.

In this dialog, click on the general tab. In this tab make sure the option with a name like: all users may use this connection is checked. Then save away the changes.

After I have done this I can boot up the UP board without the monitor and SSH into it.

Nicolas

I've connected it to the pfSense I'm setting up. Booting with the TV, it gets an IP Address when starting the network stack (before the login prompt).
Booting headless it doesn't even blink up on the firewall. And the network port shows up as 100Mbit instead of 1Gbit, so I'm guessing it doesn't even start to the point where the network goes up.

Didier

Okay.

Configure your interface statically. Then look at what happens with TV , then without TV. You can also configure statically the interface of the computer you are working from, then connect your up-board directly to it.

Now. If, as you write it, the interface shows up as 100MB/s instead of 1GB/s as it should apparently be , that may mean an autonegotiation problem. That's something that is independent of the operating system. So, there may be some flaw at the hardware level.

Jaap Crezee

I had the same issue with (headless) Linux; flashing to the latest UEFI bios fixed that for me.

Nicolas

Thanks for the hint! I didn't have time to further investigate on this, will try that.

Nicolas

If someone runs into the same problem:
I've flashed to the newest UEFI version, still didn't boot without a display attached.
As a last resort, I changed some of the UEFI settings (including enable display support in the north bridge) which resolved the issue finally.

lumani12

It required a reboot and has caused my headless ex495 (running ... in the next week or two and wont need the video adapter any longer.

E van der Pol

can you post your settings, i cant get it working with esx(i) 6.5
thank you