Headless operation

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson Nano
1

I’m experiencing problems ssh-ing into a headless Nano.

I’ve got a four node cluster (https://twitter.com/Grady_Booch/status/1390755224638218240/photo/1) running Kubernetes. Jet Pack 4.5.1 pretty much broke everything :-( so I’ve been rebuilding my stack from scratch.

These are all headless nodes, made so this way (I’ll explain the commands in <> in a moment):

<sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target>
sudo reboot now

I’ve successfully configured one of the boards, but the second one - even though I’m configuring it identically - fails in a strange way.

Specifically, on the first board, I can connect via ssh upon boot. On the second board, however, the ssh service never starts UNLESS I FIRST login in to tty1…and then the service starts immediately.

Now, I tried to purge the display manager, since I don’t need it to run headless, using these commands on both boards:

sudo systemctl stop gdm3
sudo systemctl disable gdm3
<sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target>
sudo apt remove --purge ubuntu-desktop gdm3
sudo apt purge libreoffice*
sudo reboot now

If I do all of these on the first board, no problem: upon boot, I can ssh in directly. However, on the second board…the ssh service never starts. IF I don’t carry out the command in <>, I CAN start ssh into the second board (even though there is no graphical display manager running).

Strange…

Any thoughts?

(am about to try boards 3 and 4, and see what happens next)

3

This sounds weird to me too. Do you have other interface to access the board and check the default sshd status?

For example, using serial console to access.

4

Yeah…it’s curious.

So, after installing JP 4.5.1, I do this:

sudo systemctl stop gdm3
sudo systemctl disable gdm3
sudo apt remove --purge ubuntu-desktop gdm3
sudo apt purge libreoffice*
sudo reboot now

But that doesn’t make the node fully headless, because it leaves me with the Light Display Manager. If I go all the way (on one all but one of my three nodes!) and cut off the head completely with this

sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target

Then I get the weirdness I mentioned: I can’t ssh in (and I can’t even get a response from a remote ping) until I login via TTY1.

As such, where I’ve left matters, is to do the first set of commands but not the set-default one.

This gave me no problem prior to the latest Jet Pack.

(and so…even if I set up serial access to the console as above, I still end up having to log in before I can ssh)

5

Hello Grady,

I appreciate your post for multiple reasons, I had no idea that LibreOffice was installed. Why that would be included in the Jetpack I have no idea. I removed it from mine, too, saved significant SD space.

I just experienced the same issue. I have not resolved it yet. I was in the middle of connecting my Raspberry PI camera when I ran into it.

I could not ssh into my Jetson Nano, nor did it turn up in a network map command (zmap) that I ran from other computers. The Jetson Nano did not respond to pings either. All of those issues resolved after logging in to it first.

I really hope I can get this resolved easily. I am planning to use several Jetson Nano’s and eventually higher end AI boards in a cluster along with Raspberry PI’s and some Dell servers that I have here.

Brian

6

Hey, I was having this issue and manually setting my network interface seemed to do the trick.

edit: /etc/default/networking
change:
#CONFIGURE_INTERFACES=yes
to
CONFIGURE_INTERFACES=no

then edit: /etc/network/interfaces with your network adapter information e.g.

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
wpa-ssid yourSSID
wpa-psk password
address 192.168.1.38
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1

after this I seem to be able to log in on ssh without needing to log into the jetson directly.

Good luck, hope this helps.