Troubleshooting repeated server crashes caused by kiosk autologin

Guides & How-To
1

I’ve noticed that my Start9 server would crash every few days, and after investigating through SSH logs, the only recurring error I could find was related to the getty@tty1 service and the kiosk autologin.

The situation was as follows:

  • The getty@tty1 service was set up with autologin for the kiosk user.
  • The /home/kiosk/kiosk.sh script would start automatically, and when it failed or exited, systemd kept restarting it continuously.
  • This caused repeated processes to spawn and clutter the system logs with restart messages.

Solution applied:

Disabled autologin for tty1:

sudo systemctl disable getty@tty1.service
sudo systemctl stop getty@tty1.service

After this, the server no longer spawns repeated kiosk processes.

It seems likely that the constant restart loop of the kiosk script was the root cause of the periodic server instability. No other errors appeared in the logs via SSH.

In the incoming weeks, i will confirm if my Start9 server no longer crashes after these changes have been applied.

2

Thanks for this. I assume this is a DIY device that didn’t have a monitor plugged in?

3

Correct. It’s a DIY Mini PC, and also it gets the usual “Xorg” error if I try to connect a monitor to it.