Applications and processes suddenly get stuck, changed onion address and failed Knots update - – after one year without any problems

Services Support
1

It started with Sparrow not being able to connect to the server. I couldn’t find any errors in the settings so I stopped Knots and other services to restart the server. Since the stopping process was hanging for hours, I attempted to shut the server down. Which did not work due to ‘gateway timeout’. I did a browser hard refresh and checked some other network related things (unsuccessful) and then did a hard reset using the power button. After restarting, connection issues, hanging processes and error messages still persist. I noticed that the onion address that had worked for the last year had changed, a completely different address is displayed in the Start9 dashboard than the one I entered in Sparrow. I don’t know if the onion address had already changed before the hard reset.
Things then got even worse when I tried to update to Knots 29.3.1 after the services had stopped (though there were errors again before so I’m not 100% sure if everything had really stopped). The update failed, the following error message is displayed: Install of bitcoind@29.3.1 Failed: Multiple Errors: Docker Error: time=“2026-08-02T10:52:37Z” level=warning msg=“StopSignal SIGTERM failed to stop container bitcoind.embassy in 10 seconds, resorting to SIGKILL” Error: removing image xxxxxx: container xxxxxxx using image could not be removed: cannot remove container xxxxxx as it could not be stopped: given PID did not die within timeout .
Knots 29.3.1 is displayed under services and seems ready to be started after I enforced the rdts configuration. Should I reinstall Knots because of the error message? What about the changed onion address and the other issues with services and processes constantly getting stucked? Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Update: I finally reinstalled Knots and it seems to work now. I hesitate to try stopping it to check if the hanging issue is resolved (want to avoid another hard system reset).
The onion address issue has been resolved, I forgot that the address in Sparrow is actually the Electrum onion address, not the one one the Start9 dashboard. Nevertheless, Sparrow still fails to connect

2

The Gateway Timeout message you got and that took you down a rabbit hole is usually related to connection issues or browser caching. Also, from your descrption, you are still using the old StartOS 0351. A lot of improvements have been introduced in the all new StartOS 0401 and you should have a lot better experience.

If you decide to upgrade, please carefully follow this guide step by step and you should be good to go:

3

Hi Alvaro,

Thank you for your quick reply. I think I’d better switch to the new system then. Thanks for the link with detailed instructions.