[SOLVED] Headless on Asus P5Q-E

Hi!

To save a bit of power, I would like to run my server with no GPU. I installed and configured OMV 5 with a GPU installed. If I remove the GPU, the motherboard (Asus P5Q-E) beeps the No-VGA sequence and shortly after, the distinctive OMV joyful beep sings, as usual.
Everything seems fine, but the WebUI is not accessible and the PC is not seen at all on the network. What's weird is that I can type (blindly) and login to root, type my password then type any commands (poweroff works fine).

I would assume that this motherboard can't live without a GPU, but I don't understand why OMV boot correctly and LAN is not working

Any clues on what's happening?

P.-S.: The motherboard doesn't have VGA output

It is set to static in the router. With the graphic card installed I can access the server. Without it the LAN stop working on the server.

Zitat von ryecoaaron

Are you sure the system is actually booting without the GPU?

Yes it is booting. Without a GPU, the OMV boot up chime rings and it is possible to use blindly the console with a keyboard plugged in. I logged in as root then issued the poweroff command, and the server powered off normally (with the poweroff chime of OMV).

Zitat von gromgsxr

i used to use that board headless under win7 without a grafix card and there was a setting in the bios that you need to enable to stop it 'halting on errors' or something along those lines

Good to know it should works! "Halt on error" is disabled in the BIOS, it boots fine but the LAN isn't working without a GPU.

Long story short: without a GPU the systems boots fine, but onboard LAN is not working.
I'll try using a wifi PCIE card out of curiosity.

Zitat von subzero79

So you have to use systemd .link unit to set a fix name.[...]
As i said before nic name shouldn't change but my guess is changing here every time you pull the GPU

Thank you for the info. I will be looking into the systemd and .link files, the solution might be there.

PROBLEM SOLVED!

I edited /etc/systemd/network/10-openmediavault-enp2s0.network
Changed the match section from
[Match]Name=enp2s0
to
[Match]MACAddress=00:23:54:27:40:35

So now the nic name can't change without a problem.

I did not touch the 10-openmediavault-enp2s0.link file because I did not know what to change in it, it seemed fine to me (but I might be wrong since I'm inexperienced with Linux and servers).

Thank you!

You are right. So I created this file as stated in https://www.freedesktop.org/so…md/man/systemd.link.html:

 #/etc/systemd/network/10-persistent-net.link
[Match]MACAddress=[nic mac][Link] Name=enp2s0

And ran update-initramfs -u && reboot

Also set the IP as static in OMV.

After several reboots and editing the network interface in OMV, everything keep working as intended.

Thank you again Subzero79 for you great help!