A totally headless, no GUI, INDI server?

aj55 wrote: But perhaps VNC is also stuck on the Pi in the situation you mention?

Yes, it happens before the VNC service starts.

Out of curiosity, how do you shutdown the Pi without VNC?
Is it possible from Kstars on your laptop?

aj55 wrote: Out of curiosity, how do you shutdown the Pi without VNC?
Is it possible from Kstars on your laptop?

I do that either with VNC or through Stellarmate's Web interface.

Most of the time I just pull the plug and so far (2+ years) never had a problem.

from a simple terminal something a bit less violent maybe
ssh -t yourPi poweroff
- Marc

It's built on Ubuntu right? You should be able to edit /etc/defaults/rcS
And edit/add the line: FSCKFIX=yes

From the man page -- man5/rcS.5.html
FSCKFIX
When the root and all other file systems are checked, fsck is invoked with the -a
option which means "autorepair". If there are major inconsistencies then the fsck
process will bail out. The system will print a message asking the administrator to
repair the file system manually and will present a root shell prompt (actually a
sulogin prompt) on the console. Setting this option to yes causes the fsck
commands to be run with the -y option instead of the -a option. This will tell
fsck always to repair the file systems without asking for permission.

Edit - duplicate (didn't realize posts were moderated).

BTW, there is some risk in this, it's possible for the fs to be really messed up and require manual fixing but I only know of a couple 'nix SysAdmins even capable of it (I am not one of them).

Backups are your friend! After I get an RPi sd card how I want it, I'll use one of the image reader/writer programs to make an ISO/IMG file of it. I usually use Win32 Disk Imager.