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Hi,<br>
I just stumbled over a systemd/journald related problem which may
also affect FAI installations.<br>
<br>
Some days ago, when booting a freshly installed PC (Debian jessie)
for the first time, journald could not be started, which means there
is no error logging at all: <br>
<font size="-1">"systemd[1]: Failed to start Journal Service" </font><br>
<br>
I quickly found out the essential problem:<br>
<font size="-1">systemd[1]: Cannot open /etc/machine-id: No such
file or directory</font><br>
<br>
The file "/etc/machine-id" contains "the unique machine ID of the
local system that is set during installation" (see "man
machine-id").<br>
Apparently systemd refuses to start journaling if this file is
missing. <br>
<br>
I could easily fix the problem by generating the file with
"/usr/bin/systemd-machine-id-setup". After rebooting all worked
well.<br>
<br>
Up to now I completely ignored the presence of "/etc/machine-id". I
guess I'm not the only one.<br>
<br>
Despite the importance of this "/etc/machine-id" file, it seems to
be more or less neglected in systemd documentations*.<br>
=> this fits perfectly into my general impression of systemd and
its maintainers. They have good ideas, but often their
implementation is not too well - e.g. the entire system relies on
the presence of one single file (?!) - and they seem to have poor
manners towards the users ...<br>
<br>
I was able to find at least one source of my problems.<br>
"/etc/machine-id" must come directly from the basefile - therefore
its always the same file with the same ID on all my installed
clients ...<br>
Further I just recreated my jessie-nfsroot before installing the new
PC, thereby the default basefile was also recreated - but this time
without "/etc/machine-id" in it, it seems. I don't have any clue why
this happened.<br>
<br>
I now added a script to my config/tests, which checks if
"/etc/machine-id" is present after installation. If not, the script
runs "/usr/bin/systemd-machine-id-setup" on the install host to
generate an ID.<br>
<br>
Maybe it would be an idea to include such a subroutine into the main
FAI-program, eg. at the end of "task_instsoft" or during
"task_finish".<br>
What do you mean, Thomas?<br>
<br>
At least l think its worth considering how to cope with
"/etc/machine-id" on FAI-installations, because it seems to be such
a central file for systemd, which in turn became more or less the
default init-system on Debian and Ubuntu-sytems - if we like it or
not ...<br>
<br>
By the way: <br>
Thomas, many thanks for your great support efforts - that's how it
should always be!<br>
Its impressive how you always take your time for the needs of the
FAI-users.<br>
<br>
Regards<br>
René<br>
<br>
<br>
* Recently I worked myself through quite a lot of systemd manuals
and documentations to improve my knowledge of how systemd works - a
bit like opening Pandora's Box, I know ... I'm pretty sure, I never
stumbled over this file. <br>
<br>
<code></code>
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