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I'm using Ubuntu Server 14.04 on VirtualBox. Windows host.

Not sure if it is related, but I have just installed sendmail and mailutils. After a reboot, it's stuck at the black console screen, it's stuck but doesn't hand completely.
It does not show any error or anything unusual.

The last lines of the boot screen say:

 * Stopping log initial device creation [ OK ]
 * Starting load fallback graphics devices [ OK ]
 * Starting load fallback graphics devices [fail]
 * Starting set console font [ OK ]
 * Stopping set console font [ OK ]
 * Starting userspace bootsplash [ OK ]
 * Stopping userspace bootsplash [ OK ]
 * Starting Send an event to indicate plymouth is up [ OK ]
 * Stopping Send an event to indicate plymouth is up [ OK ]
 * Starting MySQL 5.6 Server [ OK ]
 * Stopping CPU interrupts balancing daemon [ OK ]

I can ctrl+alt+f2 to login. everything else works fine but apache, which I can manually start.

I have manually upgraded MySQL to 5.6 recently. There looks nothing weird in boot.log, dmesg, syslog, etc. Except MySQL seems to try to continue some upgrade work.
However, MySQL works fine and startup it self automatically.

I tried apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. Removed sendmail & mailutils, nothing helps.

Can anyone give me some hints on how to find out the proper error message?

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  • I have this same problem, and I'm sure many others do. It doesn't have anything to do with sendmail or Nautilus.
    – John Scott
    Jul 21, 2014 at 20:53

1 Answer 1

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I managed to solve my own problem.

It was indeed sendmail that I very recently touched. I think I messed up with the config, so it won't start at boot, and stuck forever silently.

apt-get remove sendmail

Simply removing sendmail didn't work for me.

I finally did the following to bring my server back:

sudo dpkg --get-selections | grep sendmail

(Find out what sendmail packages are and then remove them all)

sudo rm /etc/mail/*

(Has to clean a file before purging one of the following packages, I forgot which one, probably sendmail-base)

sudo apt-get --purge remove sendmail
sudo apt-get --purge remove sendmail-base
sudo apt-get --purge remove sendmail-bin
sudo apt-get --purge remove sendmail-cf

Then everything works fine again after a

shutdown -r now

To conclude, a lesson for me. Do recall what you did, and rollback your last action. Of course check all the logs before trying something risky.

Enjoy~!

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