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Ran into an issue today where Apache would not load because /var/run/httpd was missing. After much hunting to find that cause of the error I was getting ([Tue Jul 25 00:06:31.574386 2017] [auth_digest:error] [pid 6179] (2)No such file or directory: AH01760: failed to initialize shm - all nonce-count checking, one-time nonces, and MD5-sess algorithm disabled).

Then I saw that MariaDB was missing its /var/run/mysql directory, and PostgreSQL was missing its directory.

What would cause those to not be made on system start-up / saved between reboots?

I would not expect to need to modify init scripts as suggested in this question.

Edit: outputs of ls -dl /var/run & ls -dl /run

lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 6 Dec 15  2015 /var/run -> ../run
drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 800 Jul 26 03:40 /run
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warren
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4 Answers4

3

{/var,}/run is vaporized by systemd on boot. It's a wonderful and entirely unexpected surprise with such low value.

If you want to ensure a directory exists after boot, you'll have to hook something in with the tmpfiles section of systemd.

/usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/httpd.conf
::::::::::::::
d /run/httpd   710 root apache
d /run/httpd/htcacheclean   700 apache apache

/usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/mariadb.conf
::::::::::::::
d /var/run/mariadb 0755 mysql mysql -

And, if your tmpfiles entries are missing, I'm betting you hand-roll your own packages (and tune, and test, and promote, for every.single.release). As long as we agree it's usually a bad idea for anything with scale or an SLA, that's cool though.

user2066657
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These config files reside /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d and /etc/tmpfiles.d/.

I needed to unmask and enable the systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service in order to have /run automatically setup at boot: systemctl unmask systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service systemctl enable systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service

mve
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Not a fix - but a fix.

After trawling through other SE network sites, forums, newsgroups, and the like, I wondered if it might be related to mount order for local and remote file systems (there are a pair of CIFS shares mounted on this server, which each have subdirectories bind mounted elsewhere).

I pushed the CIFS shares higher in /etc/fstab, and moved all bind mounts to the bottom.

Then I rebooted.

Now /run aka /var/run is working as expected.

I don't know that editing /etc/fstab mattered - but it's the only substantive change made that I know of.

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warren
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0

/var/run is considered to be a volatile and temporary directory.

tmpfiles.d is for the configuration for creation, deletion and cleaning of volatile and temporary files, which includes directories in /var/run

Files in /etc/tmpfiles.d override files with the same name in /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d and /run/tmpfiles.d. Files in /etc/tmpfiles.d are reserved for the local administrator, who may use this logic to override the configuration files installed by vendor packages.
source: https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/5-tmpfiles.d/

You can cat existing configs in /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d and ls -l /var/run permissions to help determine appropriate permissions.

create a new file [name] or httpd in /etc/tmpfiles.d; example based on /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/screen

httpd

# httpd  needs directory in /run  
d /run/httpd 0775 root apache

generic

# [name] needs directory in /run  
d /run/[name] [perms] [user] [group]
browniebytes
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