Fixing the Ubuntu 22.04 Boot Iussing on Dell VRTX

-

Finding the Path to the Fix

As we're able to reproduce the issue with a VM running inside the VMware ESXi environment, how can we fix the issue then?

My initial thought was that since it's dropping me into the (initramfs) prompt, it might indicate either some configuration, or software program, or both were missing from the initrd.img file, which is a ram disk image that the Linux booting process uses before it can load more stuff from the root file system.  The missing piece caused my system to fail to find the root file system and has to stop with the initramfs loaded.  But what exactly was missing?

So I tried to explore with the (initramfs) prompt.

(initramfs) grep multi /proc/modules 

multipath 20480 0 - Live 0xffffffffc0345000 

(initramfs) multipath 

sh: multipath: not found 

It seems the kernel module for multipath had been loaded already.  But there was no multipath command available.  Could it be that the package with multipath software was not installed?  But which package does it contain the software?

Some Google search results pointed me to this web page: https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=jammy&arch=amd64&searchon=contents&keywords=multipath

According to the information listed on the web page, there are multiple packages related to multipath function.  Especially, there is a package called multipath-tools-boot, which contains some files related to initramfs.  It must be the package!

Install Additional Package During Installation

The installation image that I was using is ubuntu-22.04-live-server-amd64.iso.  It's using the subiquity program to install the Linux OS.  During the progress, it does not allow the user to select what additional packages need to be installed.  How can we install those multipath related packages before reboot?

On the "Install Complete!" screen, there are only three options.  "Help", "View full log", "Reboot Now".

The "View full log" option will show you the log from the installation process, which provides quite a lot of information.

The "Reboot Now" option will reboot the system.

But if select the "Help" option, a menu will pop up.  One of the menu items is "Enter shell".

After selecting the "Enter Shell" option, you will get into the shell environment.  After exploring in the shell environment, I realized that the root filesystem is currently mounted under /target.  By leveraging the chroot command, we can change the root filesystem for our current session to /target as if we're running with the target system.  But before running chroot, let's also get some pseudo file systems mounted under the new root file system as the mkinitrd command will reference those filesystems for information.

Now, we can run the chroot command to switch our root filesystem to /target.
With the apt command, we can confirm that package multipath-tools-boot is available but it's not installed.  Package multipath-tools is installed though.
After running the command apt install multipath-tools-boot, the package is finally installed successfully.

Now, we can reboot the system.  After the system is rebooted, it will be able to boot successfully into the Ubuntu 22.04 installed. Finally!



Comments

  1. Bob GuJuly 16, 2022 at 7:31 PM

    To fix the bug, I submited the bug via the lunchpad.net
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/subiquity/+bug/1981914

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Secure Home Network with OPNsense

-
Image
I was working on some smart home project as I bought a new home earlier this year.  With more and more devices connected to my home network then to Internet.  I do have some concerns regarding the security of those devices.  For two reasons: Quite of the smart home devices need to have Internet connection and being controlled by some SaaS platform Any devices in my home network can communicate with the smart home devices Smart home devices can freely talk to other devices in my home network In order to provide some protection to the home network and those smart home devices, I decided to bring some open source software firewall to segregate the traffic for different types of the devices. After doing some research, I decided to go with OPNsense firewall.  According to the article on Wikipedia,  OPNsense is an open source, FreeBSD-based firewall and routing software developed by Deciso. It is a fork of pfSense, which in turn was forked from m0n0wall built o...
Read more

Dropping Into "initramfs" Prompt After Installing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on to Dell VRTX Server

-
Image
Background During one of the recent projects, I want to install a Linux OS onto a Dell VRTX server. Without checking the hardware compatibility list and with limited knowledge about the Dell VRTX server platform, I started to install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on one of the server blades in the chassis. And running into some interesting issues, which forces me to learn more about the Dell VRTX platform and Linux OS. Though spending quite a lot of effort in sorting out the issue, I am happy to share it with others who are interested to know more about it. Server blades inside the Dell VRTX chassis have no hard hard drive installed. But the chassis enclosure has 25 2.5 in SAS hard drive installed. Before starting the whole process, I picked up two of the SAS hard drive and created a RAID-1 logical drive, and assigned it to the server blade. I thought the system would be able to boot from the new logical drive. The Start of the Problem After inserting the USB disk with Ubuntu 22.04, the server blad...
Read more

Ubuntu 22.04 Multipath I/O Problem with Dell VRTX

-
Image
High-Level Architecture of Dell PowerEdge VRTX In the previous article , I explain the issue I am running into when installing Ubuntu 22.04 on a Dell VRTX server.  To understand a little bit more about what went wrong and potentially fix the problem, I tried to know how the Dell VRTX server was designed. After some googling, I found the  Technical Guide from Dell.  It revealed a pretty interesting design of the system.  The Dell VRTX system is designed to be a Cost-Effective Hyperconverged server system for a small office environment or remote office environment, where there are some compute power is needed but not on a large scale.  One Dell VRTX chassis can host up to 4 server blades, up to 25 x 2.5 in. NLSAS, SAS, or SAS SSD hot-plug drives (not including the hard drive bays on the server blades), and 8 flexible PCIe slots.  All those hard drives, PCIe slots, and network ports belong to the Dell VRTX chassis.  The chassis management syste...
Read more