No longer booting after power problems

Post bug reports related to either the kiosk ISO or the kiosk wizard here.
Forum rules
Porteus Kiosk section of the forum is unmaintained now. Its kept in a 'read only' mode for archival purposes.
Please use the kiosk contact page for directing your queries: https://porteus-kiosk.org/contact.html
cch
White ninja
White ninja
Posts: 8
Joined: 20 Sep 2018, 14:55
Distribution: Porteus Kiosk 4.7

No longer booting after power problems

Post#1 by cch » 20 Sep 2018, 15:31

I've got 13 computers running Porteus Kiosk. We had a problem with our backup generator and the computers lost and regained power repeatedly for a period of time.

After the power was stabilized, two of the kiosks would no longer boot to the flash drive Porteus Kiosk was installed on. I reburned the flash drives and everything is now fine. The other 11 kiosks continued working without issue.

I am using remote configuration, but it has not changed for some time, so I'm not sure why those particular kiosks would have been rewriting the ISO to the flash drives, but the only explanation I can come up with is that power was lost in the middle of that process on those two kiosks and the flash drive was corrupted. Would it be possible to harden the updating process so that if power is lost in the middle of it, the kiosk is still able to boot and recover itself?

User avatar
fanthom
Moderator Team
Moderator Team
Posts: 5666
Joined: 28 Dec 2010, 02:42
Distribution: Porteus Kiosk
Location: Poland
Contact:

No longer booting after power problems

Post#2 by fanthom » 21 Sep 2018, 06:01

Too bad you did not leave the kiosk at the faulty state so i could check what really happened.
Kiosk system is read only by default so power failures should not damage anything unless the power cut occurred in the middle of reconfiguration or upgrade. Burning on hd takes only few seconds (one second for SSD) so its really small chance anything bad can happen. Unless you have full persistence enabled?

"Would it be possible to harden the updating process so that if power is lost in the middle of it, the kiosk is still able to boot and recover itself?"
This feature is implemented already and is enabled for 'automatic updates' subscribers where kiosk upgrade happens relatively often. Kiosk will do an automatic rollback to a previous version if system wont finish booting 6 times in a row.

I see no reason to enable it for other cases as there is really small chance that power cut occur during kiosk reconfiguration.
Please add [Solved] to your thread title if the solution was found.

cch
White ninja
White ninja
Posts: 8
Joined: 20 Sep 2018, 14:55
Distribution: Porteus Kiosk 4.7

No longer booting after power problems

Post#3 by cch » 21 Sep 2018, 18:40

Okay, thanks for the info. Sorry, I didn't think to image one of the non-working flash drives - I was more worried about getting everything up and running. I'm just going to consider it a fluke because of what happened with the power unless it happens again.

Locked