Debian Wheezy Killed My Pogoplug

5th November 2011

After months of running a hybrid sarge/wheezy installation on my Pogoplug (the wheezy bits needed for OS X Lion Time Machine support in netatalk), a power cut forced a reboot. Unfortunately the poor thing never came back to life.

A prod with an FTDI cable on the Pogoplug’s serial headers retrieved the following console grumbles:

udevd[45]: unable to receive ctrl connection: Function not implemented
udevd[45]: unable to receive ctrl connection: Function not implemented
udevd[45]: unable to receive ctrl connection: Function not implemented
udevd[45]: unable to receive ctrl connection: Function not implemented
udevd[45]: unable to receive ctrl connection: Function not implemented
udevd[45]: unable to receive ctrl connection: Function not implemented

It seems a package update had introduced a version of udevd that the poor Pogoplug’s kernel isn’t able to support. The good news is that you don’t really need the debian-installed udevd daemon. The initrd image that the Pogoplug boots from has its own, older udevd which is capable enough.

Plugging the pogoplug’s root disk into a Linux laptop and disabling the udevd daemon (insert exit 0 somewhere near the top of /etc/init.d/udev) brought my Pogoplug back to life, and it’ll hopefully mean I don’t have to consider a more expensive NAS for a long time yet. Yay!