Opencpn 5 issue after repeated reboots on 3 Pi's

[thecivvie]

I have a working Raspberry pi for my yacht with opencpn. I have a second that is a mirror of the first and a third that I am getting openplotter to work.

After the recent storm in Ireland, our power was up and down and I discovered that all 3 lost their config and using the template to restore to last known working didn't work.

I was not at home at the time and therefore could not prevent the issue but why did opencpn lose it's working config after repeated restarts. Of course now, I will get a UPS hat or something for the main working Pi.

[Dsanduril]

I would suspect SD card corruption on the Pi' s. If the power down/up/down occurs during a boot cycle the SD card is usually toast. There's a lot of activity back and forth during start up and the file system is quite vulnerable during that process. Once startup is complete things settle down and are usually quite solid even through a power failure. But if one occurs during the boot process...

[Ben S]

Better use a SSD HAT on USB
I always switch of the power of the boat, never shutdown PI first, no problem in 2 years use.

http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...pn-208244.html

[AedanC]

Put a USB with a battery on your Pi and set it up to automatically shutdown when the power to the battery goes off. I have that arrangement on our boat (also in Ireland) and it’s been turned on and off frequently for three years now without problem. The battery can be very small as it only has to power the Pi for 20 seconds or so.

[pinguino]

It would be nice to add a couple of buttons in the settings to be able to create backups of the configuration file and recover it in case of accidental loss. It is a quite recurrent problem in boards like the Rpi that do not have backup batteries and it is relatively easy to disconnect them without realizing it.

Personally I have checked that errors in the SD in such cases are not as frequent as I thought but the loss of the opencpn configuration file is guaranteed.

And some users of the android version complain about the same.

[thecivvie]

Sorry, I should have said that one was on a SSD via usb cable adapter and the other 2 flash drives. I will add a battery hat to the main one. Will keep the rest off for now.

TBH, I don't know why I leave them powered up all the time

[transmitterdan]

Originally Posted by pinguino

It would be nice to add a couple of buttons in the settings to be able to create backups of the configuration file and recover it in case of accidental loss. It is a quite recurrent problem in boards like the Rpi that do not have backup batteries and it is relatively easy to disconnect them without realizing it.



Personally I have checked that errors in the SD in such cases are not as frequent as I thought but the loss of the opencpn configuration file is guaranteed.



And some users of the android version complain about the same.

^^^^^ thumb thumb

[conachair]

Originally Posted by transmitterdan

^^^^^ thumb thumb

Simple to do in node-red, hopefully somewhere down the line there'll be an online repository for handy node-red flows, plus openplotter V2 has paved the way to implement user apps, so once the dust settles could well be someone writes a few lines of code to do backups. I did it on V1 with node-red automated to once a week but the Pi is that reliable, not once had probs with SD card over must be 3 or 4 years constantly turned on onboard, haven't got round to sorting out out again. A spare SD card with the complete system copied over is the ultimate backup should the worst happen.

[rooiedirk]

I made my rpi using a readonly filesystem for the / and /boot, while the /home directory is read/write but in raid-5.

This means on the system files you should never have a coruption, while the /home directory is divided over 3 partions (double data, and one recovery info)

I always just switch the power off, and up to now no problems


Here is an image of my system. Using a 16Gb SD card



https://drive.google.com/file/d/10F1...vBnOprmz_/view

[rgleason]

Related. See https://opencpn.org/wiki/dokuwiki/do...linux_shutdown