Upstart Loses Track of Services ("Unknown instance")

[Richard Laager]

On Tue, 2012-04-03 at 10:24 -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Have you modified /etc/init/smbd.conf?

No.

> 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).

Thanks, fixed.


I've finally gotten to the bottom of this. It's `telinit u` that
triggers these problems.

I have the prelink package installed. It ships a daily cron job which
calls `telinit -u` after prelinking, but only if `/sbin/init` or one of
its libraries has been changed in the last day:

        # Restart init if needed
        [ -n "$(find `ldd /sbin/init | awk 'NF == 4 { print $3 }'` /sbin/init -ctime -1 2>/dev/null )" ] && /sbin/telinit u

I'm also calling this cron job from apt via a DPkg::Post-Invoke.

This explains why I'm seeing these problems "nightly" and on "package
upgrades", but only sometimes.

The man page for Upstart's telinit says about `telinit u`, "This is not
recommended since Upstart is currently unable to preserve its state, but
is necessary when upgrading system libraries."

The benefit provided by prelink is probably minimal. I can work around
this by simply not doing prelinking any more. Is that the best (easy,
short-term) fix here?

-- 
Richard
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