Login Problems

Robert.Wall · 2023-03-09T20:06:17.139Z

RichardOwen:

I’ll load it this evening and let you all know how it goes.

If you use the ‘old’ SD csrd, you will of course lose all your old data. To avoid this, retain the old SD card and write the new download to a new SD card. You might then be able to recover the old data.

RichardOwen · 2023-03-10T09:32:09.965Z

When you say, ‘quite a while.’

How long is a while?

borpin · 2023-03-10T10:00:39.910Z

How long have you waited? Is this an emonPi?

RichardOwen · 2023-03-10T10:38:27.721Z

I ran it overnight but it was still saying Booting after 9 hours.

So, just in case I’d popped the SD card out of the slot before all the files had been written, I re-burned it and shut the computer down to force all the writes to happen.

It’s been booting for 90 mins at the moment.

Just about to go shopping. Will check on it again when I get back.

It’s an emonPi.

Thanks,
Richard

borpin · 2023-03-10T10:39:26.416Z

RichardOwen:

I ran it overnight but it was still saying Booting after 9 hours.

Yes it does seem to get stuck here. After that time, I’d suggest just a reboot will sort it out.

RichardOwen · 2023-03-10T13:46:15.750Z

Back from shopping. Still Booting.

Switched it off, waited 30 secs, switched it back on again.

Same behaviour.

Half an hour ago repeated. Still the same.

Booting…Please Wait.

RichardOwen · 2023-03-10T13:48:08.173Z

I downloaded this image: emonSD-10Nov22 (Stable)

My EmonPi is from 2019.

Don’t know if that information is relevant. Thought I’d post it in case it was.

Thanks.

RichardOwen · 2023-03-10T15:10:07.658Z

I have also tried booting it with and without the sensor cables attached.

No difference.

Robert.Wall · 2023-03-10T15:30:39.585Z

That’s as expected, because all sensors feed into the “emon” ATMega 328P processor, not the Raspberry Pi.

I recently wrote the same image (10 Nov 22) to a 32 GB SD card using Balena Etcher, it booted absolutely normally in a RPi 2B. Which tools did you use to write the image to your SD card?

RichardOwen · 2023-03-10T15:53:30.887Z

Raspberry Pi Imager.

Robert.Wall · 2023-03-10T15:58:46.708Z

At this stage, it might be worth trying balenaEtcher - Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives. You do not need to unzip the downloaded image with this.

Have you checked the MD5 for the zip: 271d8d502e822e3703500a5762519c1d [NOT as published!]
and the image (emonSD-10Nov22_16gb.img) : f5d7963ffa585231210a5b4f560fc39e

@TrystanLea
Note the incorrect MD5 Hash.

RichardOwen · 2023-03-10T17:31:03.245Z

Hi,

Reburned the SD card using Etcher.

It worked well.

Back up and running.

Thanks everyone.

borpin · 2023-03-10T19:50:32.970Z

RichardOwen:

Reburned the SD card using Etcher.

It worked well.

I think the RPi Imager try to be too clever. One for the docs.

Robert.Wall · 2023-03-10T19:56:26.662Z

borpin:

One to be removed from for the docs.

FTFY.

borpin · 2023-03-10T19:58:57.537Z

~~No I’d add it to the docs i.e. don’t use the RP Imager as the imaging bit is a linked page.~~ Ah I see what you mean. Hadn’t realised that had changed.

Robert.Wall · 2023-03-10T20:19:09.350Z

Yep, I’d suggest instead of Option 2, a note that the Raspberry Pi Imager has been found to fail to create a usable image and it is not recommended.

shoka555 · 2023-04-21T16:31:34.007Z

I seem to have the reverse issue. I flashed an SDcard with Imager, which may be an issue.
I’ve used Etcher but have had much more success with imager, and no longer have Etcher installed.

This is an old emonpi unit that has worked well for years. I mistrust the original SD card, as it had collapsed, so downloaded a the latest image and burned a new SDcard.

With the new SDcard, the pi booted normally, DHCP’d an address via Ethernet and the www interface is reachable.

I followed the the process to register a user and logged in OK. I ran the upgrade process from the web interface, which completed successfully.

So far so good.

However I’m unable to get an SSH session to log in.

I initially had issues because I had public/private key authentication set up which definitely caused problems. Suppressing that changed behavior so that the login did not fail immediately,

shoka@Lenovo2:~$ ssh -o 'PubkeyAuthentication no' pi@10.255.255.33
pi@10.255.255.33's password: 
Permission denied, please try again.
pi@10.255.255.33's password: 
Permission denied, please try again.
pi@10.255.255.33's password: 
pi@10.255.255.33: Permission denied (publickey,password).
shoka@Lenovo2:~$

The symptoms are consistent with the pi user not existing.
I noticed that the update log mentioned “bullseye” which normally has no pi user, though the downloaded image says buster.
It’s also possible that the SD image is corrupted / the password on the SD is corrupted.

Installing Etcher and re-flashing the SD card requires extracting the emonpi from a very inconvenient location, so I’d appreciate confirmation that there is no other possible issue before I do that.

Cheers Harry

Robert.Wall · 2023-04-22T12:41:18.542Z

shoka555:

However I’m unable to get an SSH session to log in.

There are two ways to enable SSH - via the pushbutton menu on the emonPi, or by making an empty file on the SD card after you’ve flashed the image to it. Details are here: emonSD Download — OpenEnergyMonitor 0.0.1 documentation

shoka555:

I initially had issues because I had public/private key authentication set up which definitely caused problems.

I use this on the laptop I’m typing on, and have never had a problem (I don’t set a password on the file so this machine - not the user - has access to the emonPi. This is OK because the whole machine is encrypted anyway.)

I’m not a Pi expert - you might have to wait a bit for one of those - but I’d suspect your image didn’t get written properly, or maybe the update didn’t complete after all.

There was a problem with Raspberry Pi imager reported recently: Login Problems - #16 by Robert.Wall

You might want to look at this alternative - though I’ve no experience with it: Alternative to Etcher to write images: USBImager

shoka555 · 2023-04-22T21:31:11.379Z

Sorry missed the reply above.

Don’t know exactly what the issue was. I edited the SDcard in one of my laptops, wiped the pi password in passwd, passwd- and shadow, added a second trusted user ( I was going to add later anyway ) set up public key authentication for that user and got in that way, then tidied up the mess and regenerated the Pi password. Everything seems to be working now…

Cheers Harry
.

Bill.Thomson · 2024-08-03T03:38:18.435Z

WRT RasPi Imager vs Balena Etcher, this might be worth a read:

New clean build in a 2016 Pi 3B unit - Services won't start (10Nov22 image) Installation

After a few days of writing/re-writing drive images, it appears the solution to the original problem is don’t change the user name if you’re using the Raspberry Pi Imager. The user name is pi and must not be changed. That’s why Etcher works. i.e. there’s no way to change the user name when writing the image with Etcher. It’s OK to change the other RasPi Imager options: Enable SSH SSH password User password Configure wireless LAN Locale settings