[kwlug-disc] The joys of systemd ...

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

With every new release, Debian and derivatives (Ubuntu) go deeper and
deeper down to oblivion that is systemd.

Upgrading several machines to 16.04, I have found quirks here and there.

But on one machine there is an error that has me stumped.

The varnish package has a unit file in /lib/systemd/system/varnish.service.
Changing the ExecStart line to be as follows:

/usr/sbin/varnishd -a :81 -T localhost:6082 -f /etc/varnish/main.vcl
-S /etc/varnish/secret -s malloc,512m

Note that I have to edit the unit file to change things like the port
number, configuration file name or amount and type of storage.
Previously, this was done in /etc/default/varnish, but this no longer
the case. Ugly as hell.

OK, so I do it that way, then do systemctl daemon-reload, then start
the unit via systemctl start varnish.

Checking systemctrl status varnish says the daemon started
successfully. Checking journalctl -xe, and /var/log/syslog all say
that the daemon is started, but ps -ef shows no such daemon!

No clue as to why Varnish does not start.

Running the above command exactly as it is in ExecStart successfully
shows varnish running normally.

With the old sysvrc system, I could run

sh -xv /etc/init.d/daemon-name start and see the output.

Why is this happening and how can I go about debugging this with no
diagnostics whatsover?

Other issues related to systemd on other machines:

- Networking does not start consistently. One time eth0 will not
start, another time, it will. No error messages in dmesg or
/var/log/syslog.

Workaround was to add "@reboot sleep 30; service networking restart"
in root's crontab. It is a kludge, but without any diagnostics, how
can one go by fixing something?

-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
Fast Reliable Drupal
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and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken