sshd and RPC problems on headless server

hoofer · 09-14-2007, 07:22 PM

I have a headless server running Slackware 11.0. I recently had some hardware problems, and I had to remove my video card, so now I REALLY need to do everything remotely.

Starting today I noticed these 2 problems:
- When I'm booting my laptop it mounts some NFS stuff from the server, but now it fails with "RPC: Program not registered"
- When I try to ssh in (with any user) it gives me "Connection refused"

Plugging a keyboard on the server, I can login and play music, so I know it's working. I can also ssh from the server to the laptop and "touch" some file and it works. By the way, I can also ping the server, so I know it's connected to the network.

I'm able to scp some files from the server to the laptop, so I checked dmesg but I found nothing. I also tried scp'ing "syslog" and "messages", but something went wrong, and I only get empty files.

I also tried manually starting sshd but still got nothing.

By the way, yesterday I moved my "home" directory. It used to be a link at /, pointing to /Documentos/home, and I removed the link and moved the home folder to /. I'm not sure if it's got anything to do with my problem, but that's the only unusual thing I did recently.

I know that's not a lot of information, but it's pretty much everything I got. I'm already looking into "headless installation" options, but I really wanted to keep this system running, so I'd really appreciate any help, or even any ideas as for what's happening with my server, because at this point I'm totally lost.

Cheerful Charlie · 09-15-2007, 02:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hoofer

I have a headless server running Slackware 11.0. I recently had some hardware problems, and I had to remove my video card, so now I REALLY need to do everything remotely.

Starting today I noticed these 2 problems:
- When I'm booting my laptop it mounts some NFS stuff from the server, but now it fails with "RPC: Program not registered"
- When I try to ssh in (with any user) it gives me "Connection refused"

Plugging a keyboard on the server, I can login and play music, so I know it's working. I can also ssh from the server to the laptop and "touch" some file and it works. By the way, I can also ping the server, so I know it's connected to the network.

I'm able to scp some files from the server to the laptop, so I checked dmesg but I found nothing. I also tried scp'ing "syslog" and "messages", but something went wrong, and I only get empty files.

I also tried manually starting sshd but still got nothing.

By the way, yesterday I moved my "home" directory. It used to be a link at /, pointing to /Documentos/home, and I removed the link and moved the home folder to /. I'm not sure if it's got anything to do with my problem, but that's the only unusual thing I did recently.

I know that's not a lot of information, but it's pretty much everything I got. I'm already looking into "headless installation" options, but I really wanted to keep this system running, so I'd really appreciate any help, or even any ideas as for what's happening with my server, because at this point I'm totally lost.

Possibly if you moved home, you moved the /home/user/.shh/ directory and files too. The sshd demon runs but can't connect to your home directory properly. I have learned long ago that messing with home wasn't a good idea, it can bust a lot of stuff up in /home/user/tmp/ also. Moving the tmp file or messing with it is often begging for trouble.

Cheerful Charlie

Cheerful Charlie

hoofer · 09-15-2007, 06:11 PM

Ok, I was able to fix it.

My "var" directory was gone, somehow it was not mounting its partition at boot. I managed to copy all of the laptop's var to the server and it started working again.