No login after upgrading to 22.04.3LTS

Support & Help Requests
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#1

Hi there,

I just upgraded from 20.04LTS to 22.04LTS. After the required reboot, I get the login screen, but only guest user is shown. My home folder is encrypted, so isn't mounted when starting in recovery mode.

Now what I tried:

  • my usual username has not changed UID and is still 1000
  • From recovery mode, I made sure to complete installation of possible broken packages, and none are reported.
  • In the recovery console, switching from the root console to my username console does work, but running ecryptfs-mount-private does not appear to work and gives an error "mount: No such file or directory" when I enter my login password.
  • Trying to start the GUI with startx gives a timeout because .Xauthority can't be found (Normal, since the home folder isn't mounted)
  • I can mount my encrypted home folder to a temporary folder

Other, maybe unrelated symptom: the splash screen isn't centered anymore since the upgrade.

Can someone explain what bug may have appeared in what is usually a trouble-free operation?

#2

Hi, @Cubytus :slight_smile:

I've done some web searches and I'm afraid the short version seems to be that "ecryptfs" was deprecated in Ubuntu.

See, for instance, the following topic, in the web site "Ubuntu Forums" - https://ubuntuforums.org - started by the user "nader-amadeu" on 7th September 2022:

... and particularly the following answer in that same topic, written by the user "TheFu" on that same day (7th September 2022):

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2478859&p=14111343#post14111343

September 7th, 2022#2

TheFu

" Re: home dir disappears after upgrade (ecryptfs)

encryptfs has been deprecated since 2018.

I bet there was a clear announcement in the release notes too.

Deprecated means it won't work at some point in the future. Welcome to the future.

You might be able to gain access to the encryptfs data manually, assuming it wasn't deleted. I think it is in ~/.private/ , but since I only used it a few days, don't trust me. It had already been deprecated when I first used it for a number of important security and performance reasons, in favor of using LUKs.

Worst case, just restore from the backups you made before choosing to allow the upgrade. They backup all the files you don't want to lose, do the upgrade, and restore those files.

If you didn't make a pre-release upgrade backup set, it will be harder, but I suspect booting from a 20.04 in "Try Ubuntu" mode will allow manual access, with some magic commands, to the encryptfs files ... again, backup all the files you don't want to lose, take them to the 22.04 system and restore.

Probably not what you wanted to hear, but it shouldn't be any surprise. "

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#3

You cannot login unless your home directory has sufficient space available for GUI processes to start; thus your issue is insufficient space in $HOME; or more likely issues mounting your encrypted system (being the reason you don't have space available).

I for sure would read the response from @ricmarques

I had two systems that use(d) encrypted home, my primary PC did (it was a 17.10 install at first, and I used the option provided by ubiquity to encrypt my home partition), and that system was release-upgraded thru all releases every six months until its PSU finally died end of 2022, so it'd got me thru jammy (22.04) even kinetic (22.10) without issue.

I still have that box, as I had hoped to get a replacement PSU for it, and use it for QA testing; alas I've not found a PSU (at a price I'm willing to pay) that fits its case. I can't explore it (no working PSU), and on my replacement box (purchased early 2023) I didn't bother with encryption. (The second laptop I still have but rarely use)

My point above is I used an encrypted home on Ubuntu 22.04 & 22.10 for months without issue, thus it was possible, at least on my setup.

What may differ however is kernel stack. Which are you using??

My (LTS) installs have both GA & HWE installed; and given that install of mine only survived until end 2022; I'd have used only the 5.15 & 5.19 Linux kernels. The HWE stack of jammy or 22.04 is now 6.5 (from 23.10) which is far newer than what my [encrypted home] box ever got to... If it's related to kernel stack; maybe reverting to use the GA kernel stack maybe a solution?? (When you release-upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04; your 22.04 system inherited the default from your 20.04 system; what did it use?)

I don't know, but my 2c thoughts.

FYI: I have also non-destructively re-installed onto a encrypted home system, however as I'm no longer using encrypted home directories; I stopped QA testing it some time back.

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