Strange update issue that raises several questions

[VastOne]

Throwing this out there for discussion ... and hopefully a place of knowledge in case it happens to someone else

I did an update yesterday to the www/v-ger server that is home to secondary apps that supports VSIDO.  The update was to bring it to the 3.13 kernel and systemd and was done the same as I have done several other machines, nothing out of the ordinary debian apt-get install blah blah blah...

All went well until I rebooted to just a login screen... No X, just tty

I wanted to first eliminate a delay on the boot and knew the issue was a faulty swap setting in fstab and off to nano I went...

The first sign of 'dafuq is this? ' was trying to save fstab and being told that the file system was read only..  WELL NO SHIT!... I was su so whats the fucking problem?  ... checking around, I confirmed on everything I tried, the system was locked down.. I searched and found several things that could cause this and even ran a few things (remount of / and fsck) but nothing worked...

I went back to fstab on a hunch and found the issue.... There was no statement there for / at all!  This line had been totally removed:

Code Select Expand

/dev/sdb4 / ext4 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1

I put that back and the system booted to X immediately...

Looking back on the past couple of weeks, both jedi and I had similar issues where we did new updates and was faced with no X and just a login.  We both attacked it as a X / nouveau / nVidia issue on the update and nothing really solved my issues... I just got 'lucky' and fixed it with  the right settings of xorg.conf.

Now I am not so sure it had anything to do with luck or timing at all and that it may have been a systemd cycle (process) that was not completed and eventually did.  The only variable to all of the issues I have seen was adding systemd to a setup and then been met with no X and a login only.  Did Jedi and I both misdiagnose that these were X issues and not access issues? 

Open for debate and discussion...

[Flofleagle]

That's good idea.

[Snap]

Thanks, VastOne. No issues with my last updates two days ago. Going to update right now and report back.

Update: All good in three different installs.

[Snap]

it may have been a systemd cycle (process) that was not completed and eventually did.  The only variable to all of the issues I have seen was adding systemd to a setup and then been met with no X and a login only.

Would systemd alter fstab and xorg.conf by itself? If yes, it's becoming really invasive.

[VastOne]

I do not think systemd did / would / could alter fstab

I do think mistakes in code can be found all through this great world of FOSS.. some never reported and quietly fixed and a process that is no different than how any project is run

[VastOne]

(It would seem we let a bot open a can of worms more than a year old)