Pogo down

Currently battling an issue with my pogoplug. Unfortunately it provides everything like email, home automation, database etc. It seemed two nights ago that it just stopped responding to network traffic. ping worked, but ssh and web were refused. So I power cycled it, but the result was the same. I could hear the disk booting the OS, but this time pings to the machine wouldn't even work. ARP showed that the it hadn't even asked for DHCP (no arp mapping).

Concerned about my HW, I rebooted into the original pogo linux and the network came up fine. I tried an fsck on my root drive and it showed no issues and still no network. I even tried another pogoplug without success. I think either the kernel is corrupt or something is running out of order in the init process such that it hangs before bringing up the network.

This morning I installed a fresh debian onto a usb key and it booted. This evening I will attempt to determine the difference between this fresh install and my broken one.

Update: I have mostly recovered my system. I am still not sure what the issue is. If I kept ping running to that machine while it was booting it would consistently fail, but then come alive for 4-5 pings and then go offline again. The last message I could find in dmesg (when mounting the drive from another machine) was a normal message from the NFS kernel module.

I tried disabling various services in startup to try and narrow it down (including nfs and misterhouse). At one point my system came alive but I went in and restored some of the init and it wouldn't boot to network again. I tried setting my root disk to mount errors=continue instead of errors=remount-ro thinking that it was remounting root ro and making it impossible to write any run time files or update devices. That fix seemed to help, but subsequent boots were hit and miss.

Finally, I commented out all the local usb drives I had in fstab. I just left root and the home dir disk. Magically the system became stable. I have no idea how or why this was causing a problem with the network on boot. None of those disks were network mounted. I guess I'll be reading more on mount and fstab to see if I can explain this. In the meantime my email, home automation, and vbox images are back online.

UPDATE: 3/24/2011
I managed to restore fstab to automount all the usb drives. I had to remove the "auto" fs type to make it work. My pogo now reboots without network issues. I could have sworn that it worked for a while with the auto fs in place, but maybe not.