Ubuntu 11.10 boot problem

December 18, 2011 in Guides, Linux

Today i had a network issue on my system, so i tried rebooting my Ubuntu 11.10 server which acts like a router, firewall, DHCP and DNS server for my network. Turns out there was a rather big problem with Ubuntu 11.10 if you upgraded from a previous version.

It seems that in Ubuntu 11.10 the directory containing running processes information and lock files has changed, or well, it has for certain programs. This results in a system where certain daemons/programs expect to find sockets in /var/run, while they are present in /run, or vice versa.

This might result in a boot problem looking like this:

The first lines are not so important, what is important are the last two. It says:

After that last one, you might get that it waits for another 60 seconds for network configuration, but it will get stuck in boot after that.

Luckily i had my 3G enabled phone close, so i could do some searching, which gave me a link to a bug report and a forum post with a fix. In short, few simple steps can help you out here:

1. reboot into recovery mode
2. start a root shell
3. mount the filesystem as read/write:
   
   mount -o remount,rw /

   1	mount -o remount,rw /

4. move everything from /var/run into /run:
   
   mv /var/run/* /run/

   1	mv /var/run/* /run/

5. move /var/lock into /run:
   
   mv /var/lock /run/

   1	mv /var/lock /run/

6. create symlinks from /var/run to /run and /var/run/lock to /var/lock:
   
   ln -s /run /var/run ln -s /run/lock /var/lock

   1 2	ln -s /run /var/run ln -s /run/lock /var/lock

7. reboot

Worked like charm here. Hope this helps.

Tags: boot problem, ubuntu