11.3 stuck in reboot loop

[Bill McCormick]

I've had the latest stable 11.3 running great for weeks. Now my system goes into a reboot loop when starting. I have no previous version to boot into, and I'm hoping there's some emergency mode I can boot into. I would very much like not have to reinstall.

The last change I made was attempting to enable hardware acceleration on my plex-media-server running in an iocage. I ran the command:

iocage set devfs ruleset="10" plex-media-server

I'm afraid that once the system boots and starts this jail, it's what causes the system to reboot.

Any help appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Bill McCormick]

I got this going again.

I noticed that while the system was "crashing" after reboot, it took down my whole network. So I disconnected it from the network while it was restarting. At the same time, I also opened a command prompt and execute iocage set boot=no plex-media-server. I'm not sure which one did the trick.

 

[Rob Townley]

@Bill McCormick does your system have more than one NIC? Did you ever pin this down more? Very doubtful, but packets in an infinite loop might cause kernel problems because of a device driver.

11.3-u3.2 worked great until I installed some plugins. I am not 100% sure which plugins I installed because reboot loops started immediately thereafter.
In a boot loop, how to get into "safe mode"? Boot Loop happened immediately after installing a plugin.

 

[Bill McCormick]

Yes I do have 2 NIC's! I forgot to post back to this thread that I was able to pin this issue on both NIC's connected; system is working fine with only one NIC connected.

 

[Rob Townley]

Thanks for posting back. Then maybe it is a network loop problem due to lack of spanning tree running on your switches? Were you able to successfully setup a LAGG or LinkAgGregrationGroup in FreeNAS consisting of both cards?
I had to setup networking a few times for it to "stick" ... that was frustrating.

 

[Bill McCormick]

Yea, so full disclosure: I know just enough to be dangerous wrt networking (maybe more things). This is home media server, and there are not many users.

When I first set it up (about 5 years ago now), I think I did experiment with LAGG, hoping to create some sort of temporal distortion and watch movies before I saw them, but it never went anywhere and I just stopped playing with it.