- have an encrypted /home
- hard shut down of computer
- wouldn't boot back up to the login screen
- couldn't mount /home from emergency mode
- had to boot a Live USB key and do fsck.ext4 on / (yes, /)
- problems with mounting /home were probably more to do with emergency mode and what gets enabled for different targets via systemd
- I need to update myself on my system's work-abouts :D
Premise
I know a lot about my computer and computers. There are a lot of people who know a lot more than me. Relative to the rest of the population, there was a time 3.5 years ago when my knowledge was probably ranked at a higher percentile.
I haven't had the same time and motivation these past few years, though. One of the largest complications has been my Masters. Sure, I know a lot more about machine learning, linguistics, natural language processing, etc., but that hasn't helped me really understand my computer much more. I was fortunate enough to participate in the Google Summer of Code 3 summers in a row, but my time was always tight for that, and full-use was probably not made of those opportunities working on GNOME.
However, today was a harsh wake-up call about the consequences of idleness. My knowledge of init and rc and Linux's old boot sequence is still fairly strong, having grown up in Slackware on the command-line. However, while I've read about evolving configurations and utilities since, I haven't gotten much practise in them.
And so, it was with horror when I realised that my system would not fully boot today and I could not immediately address the issue.
Today's Predicament
My /home directory is an ext4 filesystem on an encrypted LUKS partition. Perhaps you can immediately see what is going to go wrong. Earlier today, my computer froze up. That's not uncommon. As much as I love Linux, I am never surprised when it spontaneously freezes (especially on a laptop (what with having its Internet connection and video mode and power supply changing constantly)). After trying to get it to respond for 15s, I just held down the power button as usual and then turned it back on.
Plymouth came up, I saw the fedora logo start to fill, it was interrupted by the password prompt for my /home partition, I entered the password, and then the fedora logo filled up and - nothing. It just waited there. It should switch to gdm's login screen, but it wouldn't. I could go see the terminal in the background, but I couldn't access any shells. Just the start up log. There was nothing obviously wrong.
Sometimes I would see this message, "EXT4-fs error (device dm-0): ext4_mb_generate_buddy:757: group 83, block bitmap and bg descriptor inconsistent: 21682 vs 21673 free clusers", but dm-0 is my root directory. dm-3 is my home directory.
I tried to boot into rescue mode to see if I could still access all my files. No. After supplying my password for decryption, I would see this error message "device-mapper: table: 253:3: crypt: unknown target type
Failed to activate: Invalid argument".
That sounds bad. I entered the emergency mode shell, and checked the journal. This is something I only do occasionally using journalctl, as I used to directly check logs or dmesg. Uh oh. Here it was failing to mount /home, and it was failing at the step of "/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-cryptsetup attach luks-1496...e527 none" [LUKS name contracted]. Uh oh.
At this point I started to suspect that my encrypted partition was corrupted from my hard shut-down. There's not much else I can do with my computer when it freezes up, but I haven't suffered from it being left in a volatile, at least until now.
I tried to manually mount it, but then realised I have almost never manually mounted a file system encrypted using LUKS. I've used encfs, but - uh, now what? Also, lvm2 and systemd I'm only passingly familiar with. How am I supposed to be confident in my computer's reliability if I don't even understand the fundamental tools that house my data any more?
I double-checked that my back-up was still working (I've had back-up hard drives die on me before!) using another old computer and thankfully it was OK. However, I didn't want to have to back-up from it if I didn't have to, as I had done work in the past 24 hours that I didn't want to lose, damn it. (I'm so glad that I've gotten the knack of backing up every 24 hours at least!). I also wasn't completely convinced that my data was inaccessible. On plain text file systems, it's easy to grep or scan to reclaim many/most files, even if the file system itself is corrupted or the partition boundaries have been lost. You can't readily do that when the file system is encrypted, but perhaps there was a way to repair it?
Also, this made me wonder, why was the default multi-user graphical mode stalling out? If it couldn't mount /home, it should still be able to display the login screen. I don't need a /home for that. I tried to launch gdm from emergency mode and couldn't because of failed dependencies, one of which was for binary formats. That seemed weird. I didn't remember so many things failing to start back when I was booting in the normal way. So I tried the normal way again and ... it claimed that /home mounted cleanly and even gave a plausible count of files. (!)
I then decided to boot in single-user mode (edit the grub command for the kernel I'm booting into and add 'single' on the kernel line). This took me through the same process as usual, which seemed to mount /home correctly, but instead of going all the way to the point where it was stalling, it stops successfully before at a command-line for root. Hooray!
Once there, I poked around. I couldn't immediately tell why from emergency mode I couldn't successfully mount my file systems, but there's an egregious lack of familiarity in me regarding how systemd, lvm2, and luks interact, so that's no big surprise. I did a passive run of fsck.ext4 on my / directory (remember how dm-0 had errors reported earlier?) and yes, there seemed to be quite a lot. I grabbed my Fedora live USB key from my drawer, re-booted into it, ran fsck on my computer's root partition, and let it fix all the errors. This always alarms me, as I never know what data has been lost on my file system to lead to the errors in question. There's never a guarantee that cleaning up after the errors will resolve the problem in question.
Anyway, I rebooted, I went through a normal boot and - tada, the login screen.
Conclusion
So why did I write all that? In part to motivate me to learn more about the current state of my system to regain the glory of self-sufficiency. And in part so the few error messages I encountered that another in my case might encounter will be documented, and searchable. :D
