Unresponsive Droplet After Trying to Reboot

Posted on March 15, 2021

We host our mail server on DigitalOcean, and recently began having some problems where the MX lookup for some domains was failing. So, I changed the DNS resolvers from DigitalOcean to Google in the /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.ymal file. I also added a secondary file to prevent the system from overwriting my changes.

After doing this, I rebooted the server, and it has not been responsive since (it’s been 1 hour and 20 minutes at the time of this post). I am also not able to connect to it via Digital Ocean’s console. In the graphs area of the dashboard, the droplet does show sys CPU usage of 40% (normally 0.2%) but Disk I/O and bandwidth are both at zero.

I’ve contacted support, but have not heard back yet. Has anyone else dealt with this issue, or have any suggestions? It’s a 4GB droplet using Ubuntu 18.04.

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alexdo

March 15, 2021

Hello there,

If you’re unable to access the droplet even with the DigitalOcean console then I’ll recommend you wait for our support team to reach out to you in order to get this sorted.

In case you manage to access it via the console please check the following.

What happens when you execute ifconfig -a can you see the eth0 interface listed? If this one is not present then we will need to sort this out.

I know that sometimes some packages can be uninstalled somehow on reboot and there are cases where cloud-init is one of them. You can check if the package is present and currently installed on your droplet as well.

A similar issue was reported here as well: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/no-internet-connection-after-droplet-reboot

You can check the answer posted from lukasea17033bb7e7ecf80fc21 and see the suggested steps if needed.

Create the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file
Reboot the server
Set the network interface using the information from the /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml file
Set the routing
Configure the DNS resolver conf file (you can skip this if your resolv conf is still present, I know you’ve mentioned that you’ve already copied this from a working droplet)
You can run apt update and apt upgrade
Install cloud-init if it’s missing

Also, have you tried to power off the droplet and then start it again instead of just rebooting it? You can perform this action from the control panel.

Let me know how it goes.

Regards, Alex