I turned on my mycroft Mark 1 for the first time in a while and all seemed well. I have a custom skill for home automation that I tested and it worked fine. After a few minutes, mycroft went into update mode, and since it finished updating I’ve had two problems:
- when I ssh into the mycroft, things seem normal, but when I try to do some things, like list the files in /var/log, my terminal session locks up. Also, I can tail -f a file, for instance /var/log/mycroft-skills.log, but if I try to read the whole thing by opening it with ‘less /var/log/mycroft-skills.log’ my terminal locks up. If I try to scp the file from another box, the transfer stalls, e.g:
me@otherbox # scp pi@mycroft:/var/log/mycroft-skills.log .
mycroft-skills.log 0% 0 0.0KB/s - stalled -
and I never get the file. Note - the mycroft doesn’t lock up, just my terminal session. I can ssh in again to mycroft, but if I try to read these files or directories, that session also locks up. I thought maybe there were some bad sectors on the SD card, so I opened up the mycroft and took out the sdcard an mounted it on another system. Both the boot and the main file system test out fine with fsck - f, and I’m able to easily read the files that were giving me trouble.
Anyway, when I was able to actually read mycroft-skills.log on the other system, I noticed the second problem:
- a Python module that I was using for a local skill was gone - seems like it got wiped out by the update.
So I put the mycroft back together and ssh’ed in and tried to ‘pip install [that module]’ but then noticed pip wasn’t there. So I installed pip with apt-get, then was able to install the module, so that was good.
But my skill is still not working – must be some secondary issue that comes up after that missing module. But because of problem #1, I can’t check the mycroft-skills.log without actually taking apart the unit apart and pulling the SDCard - that’s a really painful way to debug of course.
If I can solve problem #1, I am sure I will be able to get through other issues. But I can’t imagine why I would be having that problem, given that the file system integrity appears to be fine. Anyone else notice this issue?
edit - the terminal lockup is spotty - I was just able to list the /var/log files and open mycroft-skills.log in less - thought all was great, but then I tried to go to the bottom of the mycroft-skills.log file and it locked up. I experience this lockup both when shelling in from a Mac and from another raspberry pi - both of them worked very well with no lockups before – it’s true that I hadn’t turned on the mycroft for a couple of weeks, and that although I did test my custom skill today prior to the update, I did not try to ssh in today prior to the update - only after.
edit 2 - I opened the skills log and gingerly scrolled down until I saw some Git errors for my local skills - looks like they fail to load if there’s no git project for them?? Is that really true??