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Showing posts from September, 2019

DigitalOcean droplet: Repair broken Ubuntu with recovery ISO

Recently, I needed to repair a Ubuntu droplet server that was stuck in a kernel panic. The server maintainer decided to upgrade the OS from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04. Everything went well until the final restart after the upgrade when the dorplet was stuck during boot. The maintainer could not SSH into the system and the website was down as well. In the DO control centre, CPU usage of the droplet was showing 100% and the console was showing the kernel panic state and the system calls that caused it. I searched around and found this post that had a similar problem and solved it. Basically, these are the steps: Boot into the recovery ISO Mount and chroot into the existing filesystem Reinstall the kernel From the console commands, it was obvious that the solution was for REHL based distributions and I will need to use ' apt ' instead of ' yum ' for Ubuntu. I found the appropriate command after a bit of digging: apt-get install --reinstall linux-image-generic linux-i