36

I’ve a systemd-unit on my system that is enabled. The problem is, it doesn't restart after a reboot. It depends on two other services that are both started as expected.

The service is known, enabled and dead:

[centos@ansible-kube-4 ~]$ sudo systemctl status flanneld
flanneld.service - Flanneld overlay address etcd agent
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/flanneld.service; enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead)

The unit file:

[centos@ansible-kube-4 ~]$ cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/flanneld.service
[Unit]
Description=Flanneld overlay address etcd agent
After=network.target
After=etcd.service

[Service]
Type=notify
Restart=always
RestartSec=3

EnvironmentFile=/etc/sysconfig/flanneld
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/sysconfig/docker-network
ExecStart=/usr/bin/flanneld -etcd-endpoints=${FLANNEL_ETCD} -etcd-prefix=${FLANNEL_ETCD_KEY} $FLANNEL_OPTIONS
ExecStartPost=/usr/libexec/flannel/mk-docker-opts.sh -k DOCKER_NETWORK_OPTIONS -d /run/flannel/docker

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Update 1

Output of dmesg:

$ dmesg | grep systemd
[    1.312165] systemd[1]: systemd 208 running in system mode. (+PAM +LIBWRAP +AUDIT +SELINUX +IMA +SYSVINIT +LIBCRYPTSETUP +GCRYPT +ACL +XZ)
[    1.317238] systemd[1]: Detected virtualization 'kvm'.
[    1.319597] systemd[1]: Running in initial RAM disk.
[    1.323489] systemd[1]: No hostname configured.
[    1.324874] systemd[1]: Set hostname to <localhost>.
[    1.327570] systemd[1]: Initializing machine ID from KVM UUID.
[    1.389047] systemd[1]: Expecting device dev-disk-by\x2duuid-a78bb152\x2de525\x2d4f0e\x2d961a\x2dbf6147ac7d3e.device...
[    1.394577] systemd[1]: Starting -.slice.
[    1.396820] systemd[1]: Created slice -.slice.
[    1.397990] systemd[1]: Starting System Slice.
[    1.400212] systemd[1]: Created slice System Slice.
[    1.401503] systemd[1]: Starting Slices.
[    1.403556] systemd[1]: Reached target Slices.
[    1.404756] systemd[1]: Starting Timers.
[    1.406834] systemd[1]: Reached target Timers.
[    1.408042] systemd[1]: Starting Dispatch Password Requests to Console Directory Watch.
[    1.410065] systemd[1]: Started Dispatch Password Requests to Console Directory Watch.
[    1.413402] systemd[1]: Starting Paths.
[    1.415399] systemd[1]: Reached target Paths.
[    1.416574] systemd[1]: Starting Journal Socket.
[    1.418894] systemd[1]: Listening on Journal Socket.
[    1.420242] systemd[1]: Started dracut ask for additional cmdline parameters.
[    1.422150] systemd[1]: Starting dracut cmdline hook...
[    1.424870] systemd[1]: Started Load Kernel Modules.
[    1.426124] systemd[1]: Starting Journal Service...
[    1.429731] systemd[1]: Started Journal Service.
[    1.692884] systemd-udevd[213]: starting version 208
[    2.621300] systemd-journald[90]: Received SIGTERM
[    2.968711] systemd[1]: Successfully loaded SELinux policy in 274.569ms.
[    3.023076] systemd[1]: Relabelled /dev and /run in 20.031ms.
[    3.365195] systemd-udevd[382]: starting version 208
[    3.482910] systemd-journald[377]: Received request to flush runtime journal from PID 1

Update 2

Output of chkconfig:

sudo chkconfig

Note: This output shows SysV services only and does not include native
      systemd services. SysV configuration data might be overridden by native
      systemd configuration.

      If you want to list systemd services use 'systemctl list-unit-files'.
      To see services enabled on particular target use
      'systemctl list-dependencies [target]'.

netconsole      0:off   1:off   2:off   3:off   4:off   5:off   6:off
network         0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

Output of systemctl list-dependencies flanneld:

flanneld.service
├─system.slice
└─basic.target
  ├─microcode.service
  ├─rhel-autorelabel-mark.service
  ├─rhel-autorelabel.service
  ├─rhel-configure.service
  ├─rhel-dmesg.service
  ├─rhel-loadmodules.service
  ├─paths.target
  ├─slices.target
  │ ├─-.slice
  │ └─system.slice
  ├─sockets.target
  │ ├─dbus.socket
  │ ├─rpcbind.socket
  │ ├─systemd-initctl.socket
  │ ├─systemd-journald.socket
  │ ├─systemd-shutdownd.socket
  │ ├─systemd-udevd-control.socket
  │ └─systemd-udevd-kernel.socket
  ├─sysinit.target
  │ ├─dev-hugepages.mount
  │ ├─dev-mqueue.mount
  │ ├─kmod-static-nodes.service
  │ ├─proc-sys-fs-binfmt_misc.automount
  │ ├─sys-fs-fuse-connections.mount
  │ ├─sys-kernel-config.mount
  │ ├─sys-kernel-debug.mount
  │ ├─systemd-ask-password-console.path
  │ ├─systemd-binfmt.service
  │ ├─systemd-journal-flush.service
  │ ├─systemd-journald.service
  │ ├─systemd-modules-load.service
  │ ├─systemd-random-seed.service
  │ ├─systemd-sysctl.service
  │ ├─systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service
  │ ├─systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service
  │ ├─systemd-udev-trigger.service
  │ ├─systemd-udevd.service
  │ ├─systemd-update-utmp.service
  │ ├─systemd-vconsole-setup.service
  │ ├─cryptsetup.target
  │ ├─local-fs.target
  │ │ ├─-.mount
  │ │ ├─rhel-import-state.service
  │ │ ├─rhel-readonly.service
  │ │ ├─systemd-fsck-root.service
  │ │ └─systemd-remount-fs.service
  │ └─swap.target
  └─timers.target
    └─systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer
Improve this question

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
33

The unit file was modified:

Before:

[Install]
RequiredBy=docker.service

After:

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

After that modification I did not reenable the Unit. Turned out that this is needed for systemd to reconfigure:

$ sudo systemctl reenable flanneld
rm '/etc/systemd/system/docker.service.requires/flanneld.service'
ln -s '/usr/lib/systemd/system/flanneld.service' '/etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/flanneld.service'
Improve this answer
3
  • 2
    I too found that this helped and I don't know why. Perhaps reenable corrected something I hadn't done or had botched and couldn't see because I wasn't squinting hard enough. Anyway, of two identical hosts on which I was configuring to make my service come up after reboot, one worked and the other did not until I did this to it.
    – Russ Bateman
    Jan 2, 2018 at 19:38
  • 1
    Is it possible it got disabled by an upgrade? I had one suspicious server where it was disabled after an upgrade... sudo systemctl reenable rails-puma.service solved the issue
    – Dave Collins
    Apr 5, 2018 at 11:43
  • 1
    maybe relevant: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/193714/…
    – ThorSummoner
    Feb 8, 2019 at 19:10
9

I find no evidence in your configuration that this service should be started at boot time. systemd allows two ways of enabling a service so it is started at boot time:

chkconfig flanneld on

Or:

systemctl enable flanneld

In fact, the first is a legacy way of calling the second one, and I'm not sure if the chkconfig package is installed by default, but you can install it using apt-get or yum.

Improve this answer
9
  • 1
    The service is enabled. I used sudo systemctl enable flanneld to enable it.
    – maklemenz
    Sep 1, 2015 at 7:17
  • After running it it still doesn't get started at startup?
    – nKn
    Sep 1, 2015 at 7:23
  • I have to start the service manually after each reboot. It starts on first try and without any error messages or warnings.
    – maklemenz
    Sep 1, 2015 at 7:54
  • 1
    There must be something else failing. Officially, the way to enable a service on startup in systemd is systemctl enable servicename. Most examples also include the .service termination in the command, but I'm not sure this should do any difference.
    – nKn
    Sep 1, 2015 at 8:02
  • The .service suffix is automatically added when it is omitted by the user.
    – mrg2k8
    Sep 1, 2015 at 12:24
-1

I had the same problem as described. In my case, with Ubuntu 19.10.

The problem was (I think) a bug in systemctl enable <service>. It created a symlink in:

/etc/systemd/system/mutli-user.target.wants

instead of:

/etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants

Simply copying the link to the correct location solved my problem.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .