I am using a raspberry pi B+ to share some folders on a USB hard drive via SMB and DLNA. Everything seems to work great as long as the HDMI cable is connected to an active monitor when I start up the rPi.
However, the intent is to put it in a closet with the hard drive where my router is, and I found that when I put it in there it never comes up. After some troubleshooting I determined that it hangs somewhere in startup when the HDMI cable is not hooked up. I consider it to have "come up" by waiting a couple minutes and then connecting by SSH or via the web interface. If the HDMI is hooked up then I am able to see it boot to a login prompt successfully, and I am able to connect from my laptop by both methods. Without the HDMI connected, it doesn't matter how long I wait, connections to both SSH and the Web interface are refused. I should add though, that it does respond to pings.
I have tried turning on and off various options in config.txt (hdmi_safe, force_hdmi_hotplug, and various hdmi_mode settings) and I also tried temporarily replacing the config.sys with one from another image that boots up fine headlessly (that one is a basic raspbian install with a deluge daemon that does come up fine with no HDMI cable plugged in, on the same rPi) but that also did not help.
I have done apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, and rpi-update
It's odd because I do not need the monitor in any way, I can accomplish everything I need via the web interface and SSH. I think I only hooked it up in the first place to see why it wasn't booting when I initially started messing with OMV, but of course then it worked fine and it didn't occur to me at the time that the HDMI cable would be the difference. Has anyone seen this before?
Thanks!