avahi-daemon failed to start - cannot reach desktop [Solved]

[tonyawards]

I was doing a differential backup to external USB with lucky-backup, normally works fine, but this time it appeared to go bad, and it wanted to do a full backup instead. Several times. That is probably their issue - but what happened after I don't understand:

After aborting the backup twice, pretty sure it was corrupted, I exited the program and went to open firefox to look for answers. It wouldn't open. Kontact, Dolphin & other kde things were ok, so I rebooted to start fresh.

The desktop would not not load. I can get through the "F2's" worth of the boot in the terminal, it goes black briefly like normal, and then instead of the kde login screen I am back in the terminal at my root login.

The only thing I see that looks abnormal is "avahi-daemon failed to start !!" a few lines above.

Not having any idea where to start on this one. I have looked here, google, and on the gentoo forums, I tried "/etc/init.d/xdm restart" a couple of times, ran libtest, reinstalled avahi... I'm at a loss, none of the other avahi issues really seemed to pertain to this.

dbus does appear to have started already in the commands queue, that seemed to be a possible problem for some others. I tried "/etc.init.d/avahi-daemon restart" with the same 'failed to start' message.

Could these problems be related (I'd think, but how?) and more importantly, what can I try to get back into my desktop?

My system was all up to date, I had even put another gig of RAM in the other day (ran great) and was having no issues at all for a while.

I don't even know what logs you'd need but any guidance or direction will be much appreciated, and I'll try to get what you want for additional info.

Thank you very much.

[tonyawards]

Update:

I just tried deptest (no, I really don't know what to do here) and it decided to install the ati-userspace for xvba-video (don't need it, have nvidia, but don't care right now) and virtual : logger-0 for lm_sensors.

BUT- when it DID try to download them I got another strange error - I'm copying code from my computer here, but basically it's (at 71% of the download):

Code: Select all

ETA: 5s exception in thread Thread-2: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/threading.py", line 552, in _bootstrap_inner self.run()
File "/usr/lib/entropy/lib/misc.py", line 353, in run self ._rc = self._function(*self._args, **self._kwargs)
File "/usr/lib/entropy/lib/entropy/fetchers.py", line 1012, in do_download ds[th_id] = downloader.download()
File "/usr/lib/entropy/lib/entropy/fetchers.py", line 323, in downlaod status = downloader()
File "/usr/lib/entropy/lib/entropy/fetchers.py", line 668, in _urllib_download self._urllib_commit(rsx)
File "/usr/lib/entropy/lib/entropy/fetchers.py", line 691, in _urllib_commit self._localfile.write(mybuffer)

IOError: [Errno 281] No space left on device

with a blinking cursor waiting at the moment.

Huh, No Space left on device?? Can this relate to several attempts of a bad backup? I have a 250GB hard drive and back up data files to a 100GB external USB drive. Would this prevent avahi starting and/or my full boot coming up? If this is it or part of it, how can I free up the perceived space or ... ?

[genfool]

with that error. I would open a terminal and run the command

Code: Select all

df -h

See what it says and post it here if you can.
How much space did you give sabayon? It is possible to fill a drive to the point it will not boot. I did this once on a laptop. I only took it to work and used it as a music player with xbmc, I was putting one more cd on it and the cd actually failed to finish copying to the hard drive... rebooted and it would not complete the boot ... I think I booted a live sabayon cd and started deleting some stuff from it, it then booted and worked fine.

I do not know how your backup program works, but is very possible it is the culprit.
Run the command above, see if it is true ... then decide how to get rid of the failed backup attempts, where they are stored etc...

[tonyawards]

Right on track, genfool. Running df -h showed that my / was full. I had attempted several backups of about 60+GB worth of /home data and it was all stuck in /media/backup, instead of making it from there to the external USB drive. And when it was full...

I deleted all the data in the /media/backup directory and it booted right back up with no errors. Now I just have to find out why it stayed there instead of transferring to the USB drive. Possibly bad cable, connection, destination setting, etc.. Most likely a combination of user and operator error - it wouldn't be the first time...

Thanks for pinpointing the culprit so fast, genfool - much appreciated, as always.