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Today, I installed havaged to my Arch Linux System (rolling release, systemd). 

# systemctl start haveged

is supposed to start the daemon but that just wouldn't work. This is what the log had to say: 

systemd[3916]: haveged.service: Failed at step STDIN spawning /usr/bin/haveged: No such file or directory
systemd[1]: haveged.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=208/STDIN
systemd[1]: haveged.service: Unit entered failed state.
systemd[1]: haveged.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

The first error message in the log is wrong. /usr/bin/haveged does exist, of course. I even tried removing the package and reinstalling it but nothing helped, the daemon just could not be started properly. I even tried to restart systemd using systemctl daemon-reload but to no avail.

In the end, I rebooted the system and - voilà - haveged can be properly started.

Why was this reboot necessary? Was there anything I could have done differently to avoid this reboot?

Update: The content of the unit file:

$ /usr/lib/systemd/system/haveged.service

[Unit]
Description=Entropy Harvesting Daemon
Documentation=man:haveged(8)

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/haveged -F -w 1024 -v 1
SuccessExitStatus=143

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
vic
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1 Answers1

3

The first error message in the log is wrong.

It's not wrong:)

systemd[3916]: haveged.service: Failed at step STDIN spawning /usr/bin/haveged: No such file or directory

The key message is Failed at step STDIN

What does it mean?

There is a directive StandardInput=:

Controls where file descriptor 0 (STDIN) of the executed processes is connected to. Takes one of null, tty, tty-force, tty-fail or socket.

...

This setting defaults to null

Service startup failed here:

r = setup_input(context, params, socket_fd);

setup_input failed here:

case EXEC_INPUT_NULL:
            return open_null_as(O_RDONLY, STDIN_FILENO);

And open_null_as:

    fd = open("/dev/null", flags|O_NOCTTY);
    if (fd < 0)
            return -errno;

    if (fd != nfd) {
            r = dup2(fd, nfd) < 0 ? -errno : nfd;
            safe_close(fd);
    } else
            r = nfd;

So, open("/dev/null", O_RDONLY|O_NOCTTY) failed: No such file or directory

Can you reproduce it?

  • purge the package
  • reboot
  • install the package
  • systemctl start

Can you append the output of systemctl cat haveged?

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Evgeny Vereshchagin
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  • Hi Evgeny, thanks for your answer, that's interesting. I could reproduce the error as long as I did not perform the reboot. Once I rebooted, the error was gone. Hence my question: why was the reboot necessary? – vic Dec 27 '15 at 12:22
  • @vic, you deleted your `/dev/null` somehow. `/dev/null` was restored on reboot. there are commands for creating `/dev/null`: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/27279/how-to-create-dev-null – Evgeny Vereshchagin Dec 27 '15 at 17:33
  • OK. I'm not going to say that that's not true as I have no means of verifying it now. But I can guarantee that I did not play around with `rm`, and certainly not in the `/dev` folder. This is a fresh install and all I did was download and install a few packages, `haveged` among others, and I ran into the described issue. I'll try to reproduce it though I won't be able to do it very soon. – vic Dec 27 '15 at 17:50
  • @vic, `> This is a fresh install`. Maybe, something went wrong at installation time. Anyway, you didn't have the `/dev/null`. `/dev/null`-existance fixes your issue. – Evgeny Vereshchagin Dec 27 '15 at 22:06