Reboot question

[dfoy]

How long should a reboot take? I have had to restore from backups twice now after experiencing what seems to be an endless reboot that appears to never finish.
It seems to be happening again (9/28/2021).
Am I just being impatient?

[dfoy]

I'm now restoring the Vultr backup taken this morning at 9 am. I was never able to get my Cloudron installation to run following the reboot -- all it did was show me the red bar with the "Cloudron is rebooting" message, even though when I used the Vultr instance console it was obvious that Ubuntu had completed the reboot and was ready.
This is the third time I've had to do this. What am I doing wrong?

[dfoy]

It didn't work. The backup from 9 this morning has been restored, but the Cloudron install still refuses to boot.
I'm now going to have to install a fresh Cloudron and painstakingly re-install everything (losing all my email records in the process. It will probably entail a complete re-working of all my Cloudflare settings.

Surely this isn't normal.

[dfoy]

Update: a repeat of a restore of a backup has it running again. Just a day's worth of emails gone.
How can I reboot in the future without all this agony? Only from a terminal? I'm never going to use the on-screen "reboot now" button again.

[nebulon]

Reboots are usually quite fast in those VPSs so it seems the instance breaks the installation during bootup. If this happens again, SSH into the machine and look at the system logs as well as /home/yellowtent/platformdata/logs/box.log Further make sure the box and nginx service is running. This can be checked with systemctl status box/nginx for example.

[girish]

Reboot are usually instantaneous, less than a minute. I think the issue here is something else. As @nebulon suggested, after a reboot, if things are unreachable, check the following in order:

• Can you SSH into the server?
• After SSH, try systemctl status box and systemctl status nginx. Are they both in running state ?
  • If they are not, try journalctl -u nginx -fa for nginx and tail -f /home/yellowtent/platformdata/logs/box.log for box
• If both above work, check if there is some DNS issue. If you do host my.cloudrondomain.com on your PC/laptop, does it return the IP address of your server? Note that in some VPS providers when you restore from backup, the IP address changes. If this is the case, then the DNS must be updated accordingly to access the dashboard. If the DNS entry is wrong, you will see the red banner that you saw in your case.

[dfoy]

@girish Thank you. I'll save these comments for the next reboot. Is it possible that there is some wrinkle in the way Vultr provisions the instance? If so I want to alert them to it.

[dfoy]

@nebulon Thanks. If I keep having this issue I'll start troubleshooting as you suggest, and will probably try to get the Vultr support people involved as well.