In a boot loop, how to get into "safe mode"? Boot Loop happened immediately after installing a plugin.

[Rob Townley]

FreeNAS successfully restarted many many times until i installed SyncThing, Dropbox, and maybe even a third plugin. During the installation of one of the plugins, FreeNAS crashed and rebooted and crashes again upon bootup immediately after the text console menu is displayed. There is no time to choose anything from the FreeNAS menu and certainly no time to do something in a web browser before it crashes and reboots again. So I think this should be simple, I will boot into safe mode and disable the plugins. This is a fresh installation, so there is no previous kernel.

What do i mean by "Safe Mode?" Firefox can be started without any plugins, otherwise known as "Safe Mode." Windows can be booted into "Safe Mode". How does one boot FreeNAS normally, but with plugins disabled or uninstalled?

Fresh install of FreeNAS 11.3.u3.2 which ran well and rebooted several times without crashing. Immediately after installing syncthing and dropbox(?) plugins, the machine restarted on its own and restarts again immediately after bootup.

References to safe mode on the forum and website refers to articles from several years ago.
I have dabbled with:

1. Trying various boot menu options such as single user mode and
2. "Initial Install".
3. sqlite3 /data/freenas11-3.db and select * from plugins_plugins; along with other tables, but nothing is returned for actual plugins.
4. Booting from the installation media, hoping to find the LiveCD option.

There must be a safe mode comprehensive guide that google is not finding.

 

[Samuel Tai]

There is no safe mode for FreeNAS. So far as I know, there is also no DropBox plugin, either iX-official or community-developed. What are you using as the boot media? If a USB stick, this is likely the cause of your boot instability.

 

[Rob Townley]

@Samuel Tai
There used to be an explicit “Safe Mode” boot option in FreeNAS. In fact, I am sure there are screenshots of boot menus containing it here on the forums.

 

[Samuel Tai]

I went all the way back to FreeNAS 8.0.1. There has never been a "Safe Mode" boot option in the documentation, only options for rebooting into a previous boot environment. You may be confusing this with the "Reset to factory defaults" console menu.

Nevertheless, this doesn't exist in 11. You could try booting in single-user mode, and then running iocage clean -a to wipe out all jails and plugins.

 

[Rob Townley]

After booting into single user mode, would I need to zpool import or mount? Getting Errors.

Code:

iocage list

results in

Code:

ValueError: Unable to configure handler 'file'

Code:

iocage clean -a
echo "PYTHON ERRORS"
echo core.py  
echo iocage_cli/__init__.py   
echo config.py  
echo "PYTHON ERRORS"
ValueError: Unable to configure handler 'file'

 

[Samuel Tai]

Yes, you'll need to import your pool.

 

[Rob Townley]

How does one remount in read and write mode instead of read-only?

WORKS to get to zfs boot partition to rw mode:
# zfs set readonly=off freenas-boot

Here is what i tried, but nothing worked:
/etc/fstab is empty.
mount -rw /
mount / -o rw
remount

 

[Samuel Tai]

Try zpool import -o readonly=off <name of pool>.

 

[Rob Townley]

# zfs set readonly=off freenas-boot #successful, mount no longer shows read-only
# zpool import #seemed successful
# zpool status #returns normal and online for both freenas-boot and storage.
# iocage list # Same Long python errors.
....
ValueError: Unable to configure handler 'file'
#

 

[Samuel Tai]

Did you try sourcing root's .cshrc?

 

[Samuel Tai]

Actually, it may be faster to just install 11.3-U3.2 to a new boot drive, and then import the storage pool when it boots. After that, you can run iocage clean -a.

 

[Rob Townley]

It has been a long time and do not remember exactly because there were many additional problems. I ended up downloading a newer 11.3-u5 or something and found it had more options for booting into single user mode and then managed to get in the GUI and disable anything that depended on the old /storage/ mount location so turned off NFS and iSCSi and logging to /storage and probably something else. Then it would boot normally.