Upstart Loses Track of Services ("Unknown instance")

[Steve Langasek]

On Tue, Apr 03, 2012 at 11:32:19AM -0500, Richard Laager wrote:
> > You don't mention any other services by name so it is rather difficult
> > to speculate.

> I'm seeing this with smbd for sure. I believe I'm seeing it with cups,
> but it was only once (on Precise) so far.

Have you modified /etc/init/smbd.conf?  smbd works reliably for me under
upstart with the existing job, which does:

  exec smbd -F

smbd *must* be run as a foregrounded job, because its startup behavior is
such that upstart can't accurately track its fork()s; but the stock upstart
job already deals with this.

If you're seeing this behavior with the stock smbd job, please boot the
system with '--verbose' on the kernel commandline, capture the output of
'status smbd' once booted, execute 'sudo service smbd stop' to reproduce the
wrong behavior, and send us a copy of /var/log/kern.log.

(BTW, this may be better done as a bug report against the upstart package;
from an Ubuntu system, run 'ubuntu-bug upstart' to file a new report.)

> > However, if you
> > are seeing strange behaviour for jobs you have written, I suspect you have mis-specified the
> > 'expect' stanza in combination with specifying 'respawn' (doing so will give strange behaviour).

> Here's my configuration file:

>         # dms10-alarms - DMS10 Logging

>         description "DMS10 alarm logging"

>         start on runlevel [2345]
>         stop on runlevel [06]

>         respawn

>         script
>             exec tty-cronolog /etc/tty-cronolog/dms10-alarms
>         end script

Why use 'script' for a single exec?  You can omit the script / end script
entirely, and the behavior should be the same (except in the case that
tty-cronolog can't be exec'ed).

That definitely doesn't explain the behavior you're seeing, though.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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