Sad face loop after adding transmission

Help and Support
1

Hello All,

My RPi2 has started sadfacing in a loop since last night. The last package change was last week when I installed OpenVPN, but its been working since since then. The last action I took on this instance of OSMC (I run a few more nodes) was a library update. Previous to that the last administrative action I took was adding the debian-transmission user to osmc group.

I realize I should have installed transmission from the MyOSMC instead of the Jessie package, but it ran for several days after installing that, and only just broke yesterday.

I’ve since removed transmission-daemon (sudo apt-get remove transmission-daemon). You can see more in my apt log (link below).

I’ve read all the other Sad Face Loop (SFL?) comments & topics, but I can’t find one that looks like mine and none of the solutions work. So - personal sad face there.

So far I’ve tried:

  1. Remove tranmission-daemon.
  2. fsck on the /boot and the /.
  3. moved .kodi out the way to force a redo.
  4. Turned on debug logging & looked through all log files for anything obvious.

I really don’t want to do a re-image because I’ve got this specific instance really set up the way I want (RetroOSMC, Kodi, Sickrage, Transmission-Daemon, you know - the usual).

Anyway - My log files are here: http://paste.osmc.io/atumaxawuq
I’ve got no problem uploading an sdcard image to my own server if someone wants to flash it to a card and see if they can troubleshoot it.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

2

OK - so I solved this myself.

When I attempted to run KODI as the osmc user, I got the following error (which wasn’t in ANY of the log files):

  • failed to open vchiq instance

A real quick google search turned up that this is caused by the user that KODI runs under (osmc) wasn’t in the “video” group, so I did a:

sudo usermod -a -G video osmc

and then a reboot:

sudo reboot

and it came back up.

Hope this helps someone else.

3

The OSMC user already has the video group as a secondary group for exactly this reason. If you had to re-add it then somehow you have previously mucked up the secondary group membership of the OSMC user, perhaps through careless use of usermod.

I would check against a fresh install to see if any other groups are missing too - it’s likely they are.

4

Thanks for the feedback.

I will check for other missing supplemental groups that might be missing. Any chance you could give me a list of what they should be on a vanilla fresh install? I’ve only got two OSMC Pis and they have been tweaked pretty heavily, and I couldn’t be sure they weren’t also modified without quite a bit of effort to restore them once I reinstalled.

I understand if that is a lot to ask, and since its working I’m not overly worried about it.

For those that might stumble across this thread looking for solutions to these errors, another indication that something was wrong was that my custom bashrc script that shows the CPU & GPU temp wasn’t giving me an answer for my GPU temp until I added the user back to this group.

So - if you run ‘/opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd’ and don’t get the response you expect this might be the issue.

I hope this helps someone.

Thanks,
Brad

5

Here are the groups on a fresh install:

osmc@vero2:~$ groups
osmc adm disk lp dialout cdrom audio video

The audio and video group membership are the most important ones - if those are missing then Kodi will not be able to access various /sys and /dev devices.