Subject: bug#56519: Shepherd non-deterministically fails to load the "guix-daemon" service after the "user-processes" service has been started

From: Markus Nilsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2022 06:23:41 +0000

Hi Ludo,

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

>Could you check what /var/log/messages says for this specific occurrence?

>It will shed some light as to what services were started, in what order,
how they failed, etc.

I have attached the kernel log information for today (August 5 2022) as
well as the output of "herd status". You can see that on line 1020
"user-processes" successfully starts, but "guix-daemon" or "nscd" doesn't
attempt to start afterwards for some unknown reason. Below is a summary of
the relevant events from the log:

1 - System starts booting
873 - "user-processes" service fails to start
908 - "user-processes" service fails to start a 2nd time
910 - "nscd" service fails to start
920 - "user-processes" service fails to start a 3rd time
922 - "guix-daemon" service fails to start
943 - "user-processes" service fails to start a 4th time
1020 - "user-processes" service starts successfully
1071 - "ntpd" service starts successfully
1075 - "mcron" service starts successfully

This seems to indicate that the Shepherd will attempt to start
"user-processes" multiple times until it succeeds. But Shepherd won't try
to start "guix-daemon" or "nscd" if it has failed once.

Cheers
Markus