Need emergency help, severe problems logging in!
 

UPDATE: I was able to hit ALT-F1? or CTRL-ALT-F1? and open up another console. I logged in as root, verified the scrub was finished and issued the 'reboot' command and all is well in the universe. TeamViewer was acting REALLY odd when I installed it. Lots of flashing screens when I moved my mouse. Maybe TeamViewer captured keyboard input when it hung as I tried logging in that one time? In any case, Antergos is rocking along nice and steady. Thanks to those that jumped in with suggestions!


So Saturday morning, I ripped Mint 18 off my Plex media server setup and installed a fresh copy of Antergos with the Cinnamon desktop.

I got everything installed and working perfectly. Had a few stumbling blocks but all in all, not to bad. Saturday night, I had MDADM do a scrub of my RAID 5 array. It took about 12 hours but no errors reported. Sunday night, I kicked off a scrub of my RAID 6 array (neither of these arrays are boot drives… I have an SSD for my boot drive and the RAID arrays are just data… but remember this 2nd array scrub, it will come up later in my story).

So over the weekend, I did a couple reboots to test things out and everything was going like clockwork. Applied some updates, installed TeamViewer, all systems go!

When I got up this morning, I wanted to use TeamViewer to connect from a Windows box upstairs into Antergos to check on the progress of the MDADM scrub of the RAID 6 array. I connected via TV, typed my password to unlock the screen and opened a terminal, elevated my access and checked the status. It had about 2.5 hours left to go. I locked the screen and disconnected TV.

Then, I noticed that on this same Windows PC, it gave me an error about how the backup program couldn’t find ‘server-pc’ on the network. Then I remembered, when I installed Antergos, I set the hostname as ‘antergos-server’. I thought, no biggie, I’ll just use TeamViewer and connect to the Antergos box in the basement and correct that real quick.

I connected via TeamViewer, typed my password at the lock screen and got logged in with no problem. I opened a terminal and elevated my access and edited /etc/hostname and erased ‘antergos-server’ and typed ‘server-pc’ and saved the file and exited out of the editor.

I disconnected TeamViewer.

The PC STILL had problems seeing ‘server-pc’ then I remembered, I could just type ‘hostname server-pc’ to change it immediately (I couldn’t reboot because the scrub was still going).

Back to TeamViewer. I logged in and carried out the command and Antergos instantly switched the hostname to ‘server-pc’. I locked the screen then logged out of TeamViewer.

I didn’t bothered checking the Windows box if the backup program was happy now and was able to see ‘server-pc’ and back up it’s files so I moved on to something else. Breakfast.

After breakfast and right before needing to leave for work, I launched TV again as I wanted to check the status of the scrub. But this time, it got stuck at something like “initializing display”… or something along those lines. No biggie, TV has done this to me before with Mint so I closed it and re-opened it and tried connecting to the Antergos box again. Same problem.

I walked downstairs and jiggled the mouse to wake up the monitor. The lock screen came up. I typed my password (I could see the asterisks popping up) and hit enter and nothing happened. No error about wrong password, screen didn’t unlock, it just sat there.

Perplexed, I clicked on ‘Switch user’. This brought me to another login screen and I typed my password there and THEN the screen unlocked. I thought I was out of the woods but I quickly realized that nothing was launching. I clicked the terminal shortcut and I get a spinning wheel for a bit then back to mouse cursor. Clicking on the Chromium browser shortcut, same thing. Clicking on the “start” button, nothing comes up.

I don’t think the box is locked up or crashed because I was able to verify Plex is still running when I logged in to plex.tv from another computer.

What in the world did I do? Could changing that hostname be responsible for all this? Unfortunately, I don’t think SSH is running because when I tried SSH’ing into it, I got a ‘connection refused’ error.

I didn’t want to just force the computer off via the power button because the MDADM scrub is still running. Even if I could force a reboot, will it come back up and be in this same state?

I have a UPS hooked up to it and I did configure that to shutdown once the battery level is critical but with Arch being Arch… when I installed the APC-UPS program, I’m not sure if there was some SystemD service I needed to activate to get that working!?

So on a scale of 1 to 10, how screwed am I? ��

I’m stuck at work for the next 6 hours but would greatly appreciate any and all offers of assistance!

I would do without a media server for as long as it takes to check your config files. You're running round in circles, thinking this is a small issue, but you haven't sorted it that way,

Just SLOW DOWN, and validate each piece of the chain. Can you log in? See the media? Access it? I realize this may cause withdrawal symptoms, but I'm sure you will get over it. Have you checked logs everywhere?

Oh Plex is still up and running perfectly. I have a few SMB shares set up and they all work 100%. Right now, I can only log in after I click "Switch User" and type my name/pass. But, when the desktop loads, nothing I click on runs. Just a spinning wheel when I try to launch any app. The only thing I can do from there is lock the screen. I'm positive the MDADM scrub is finished by now so when I get home, I'm going to try and issue a reboot command from the start menu or hitting some key combos (CTRL-ALT-F1, ALT-F1, etc) so see if I can log in from another console as root and issue a reboot.

It's just super bizarre that everything has been working fine until I messed with changing the hostname.

In addition, There is a lot of unknown information... Without knowing how your network is configured, how your computers are configured i.e static or DHCP and what service you are using for a local DNS if anything it is impossible to say.

Some network process might be hung up if the client/server is unavailable. If you can get to a terminal check the running processes.

Have you tried changing the hostname back...at least until you figure out what's going on...?

Would a hung network process prevent me from physically logging into the system? I can understand how TeamViewer could screw me up remotely but when I sat in front of the keyboard of the Antergos box, I still couldn't log in. In any case, I updated my pain post, all is good now. Thanks for offering advice though!

I updated my OP. Everything is working now. Thanks!