Cannot SSH to BBB anymore

Hi guys,

Not sure what’s happened and not sure where to start troubleshooting.

My BBB won’t respond to SSH requests from Terminal on my mac, this was working perfectly fine just days ago and I am trying to go back and understand what changed.

I worked mostly using Cloud9 and running scripts with Python and JS so I have quite a bit saved on it that I would like to recover if possible before resorting to re-imaging.

The board seems to turn on fine with all the LEDs turn on sequentially and then they start pulsing as they would when the OS is running.

The board is both connected directly to my Mac and to a LAN via ethernet.

Are you sure you're trying to ssh to the right address?

Do you have any means of checking your LAN to see what devices there
are on your LAN? If so look at the list of IPs and see if you can see
the BBB one or (it might have changed) one that you don't recognise.

Thanks for that Chris, an arp -a does not return a beaglebone default IP of 192.168.6.2 on the LAN.
I will look into the other device addresses on the network and hopefully one of them is the BBB.

I also just thought of using the HDMI link on the board and connect to a display and use keyboard directly off it to see what the matter is.

Will report back with results once I find a mini HDMI cable…

But is your LAN 192.168.6.x? I doubt it very much!

The LAN sub-net is created by your router (usually) and the default
tends to be 192.168.1.x though that isn't universal.

The BBB 192.168.6.x address is the one it sets up itself for use over
USB (I think) so that won't appear on your ethernet LAN.

The BBB can have two IP addresses, the one on the USB connection to
your computer and the one on its RJ45 ethernet connection which will
be set by the DHCP server on that network (usually the router).

On Fri, 18 May 2018 10:21:40 +0100, Chris Green
<cl@isbd.net> declaimed the following:

The BBB 192.168.6.x address is the one it sets up itself for use over
USB (I think) so that won't appear on your ethernet LAN.

  That may be the Mac-default USB device, my Windows rndis USB device
comes up as 192.168.7.2

  Meanwhile, my WiFi router has been configured to reserve 192.168.2.105
to the BBB (well, the one I keep playing with -- the other one would only
be on the list if both are showing the same MAC address). Two reservations
for the R-Pi3 (WiFi vs cable -- hmm, and I have a new R-Pi3+ on the way
that may need reservations too).

  Yes... 192.168.2.x -- to avoid potential conflict the WiFi is 2.x where
the DSL modem (depending on which one is behaving -- I tend to swap them
when I start getting many disconnects and reboots of the DSL line) is
either 1.x or 0.x

I think it depends which end does the creation of the USB link but I'm
not quite sure. Anyway either 192.168.7.x or 192.168.6.x is almost
certianly the USB connection.

Thank you for the input Chris and Dennis,

I have picked up working on the BBB again and tried plugging it into a display via the mini HDMI and it seems like the beaglebone does not boot into the OS as all I see is a blinking cursor top left of the screen.

I tried booting from an SD card and that seems to work fine but I am unsure how to access the eMMC to retrieve files before re-imaging.

Is there a process making that possible?

Thanks in advance

On Wed, 23 May 2018 16:34:45 -0700 (PDT), yassyass
<yasirhilali@gmail.com> declaimed the
following:

I tried booting from an SD card and that seems to work fine but I am unsure
how to access the eMMC to retrieve files before re-imaging.

Is there a process making that possible?

  Mount the eMMC onto the file-system of the running SD card. Copy
files...

Mount the eMMC onto the file-system of the running SD card. Copy
files…

Thank Dennis,
I am just a novice at this so other than directing myself to the ‘/dev/disk/’ directory I am unsure of what is possible from there and how I should identify the eMMC from the SD card which is what I am booting from.

debian@beaglebone:/dev/disk/by-path$ ls

platform-48060000.mmc platform-48060000.mmc-part1 platform-481d8000.mmc platform-481d8000.mmc-part1

debian@beaglebone:/dev/disk/by-path$

Try `fdisk -l`… the eMMC will be 2 or 4GB, the SD card will be whatever
capacity you inserted.

Thanks for that Stuart, that helped me identify and find my files.

I will flash the eMMC and restore the recovered files.

As root, or 'sudo fdisk -l'.