A bit of context: I had a working NixOS Configuration. Today I noticed that CPU usage is unexpectedly high. htop showed that a process called celery related to paperless-ngx container is consuming a big portion of CPU. I tried to stop that process, but could not, as it said something like docker usage is full or something (I don’t remember the exact message). Paperless-ngx was installed in my machine via docker-compose.
So rebooted the computer with a hope that celery process would stop, but now NixOS fails to start as it is stuck on a black screen, and it says “Failed to start Syncthing service” and then “Failed to start Display Manager”, so I assume for some reason some system services are failing to start. see picture below:
BTW even when screen is stuck here, I hear the fan of computer turning high.
When I hold the power button to force shut down, all running services stop, but the screen stops for a 1-2 minutes saying “systemd-shutdown[1]: Waiting for process: 2431 (redis-server), 2563 (tini), 2727 (gotenberg)”, and then system completely shuts down. I think redis-server and gotenberg were related to paperless-ngx container that I had deployed.
I also tried to rollback to a previous generation by pressing Esc during the reboot and selecting an older generation, but it gets stuck at the following screen:
Just to add. Despite this error, it seems like some services (like Jellyfin or Audiobookshelf) running via docker on this machine have successfully started and are running on this machine because I can access those services via my phone, but not all docker containers are running.
Would it be possible to access the console of this machine without the need to start the Display Manager? Then perhaps I could run a docker compose down -v to stop the paperless-ngx and then it would solve my problem?
or it might be that the issue I’m facing here is unrelated to Paperless-ngx container and only related to a failing Display Manager. But then I don’t know how to fix that.
I’m bit lost and clueless here. Any suggestions to further troubleshoot is much appreciated.
Hello
So to acess a terminal without DisplayManager you can change the tty (crtl alt 5) to change to tty 5.
If this does not work can you post your config and you specs?
To test the displaymanager try setting it to X and disable wayland via the option.
To do this (when you can’t acess your Machine) do the following:
Boot from installation media Nixos
mount /dev/[root partition] /mnt
mount /dev/[boot partition] /mnt/boot
sudo nixos-enter
nix-store --verify --check-contents --repair #to check and repair your nix store
Hi @Postboote, Thanks for your kind help. I was stuck because I did not know how to enter tty! Indeed entering CTRL+ALT+5 at the screen that was stuck worked and from there I could further troubleshoot.
In fact, the reason seemed something very silly. Pinchflat had consumed all the disk space. So once I opened some space, the Display Manager started correctly with no problem.
