Sunday, June 8, 2014

problems encountered while switching to systemd

Computer stopped booting

After the latest dist-upgrade in debian SID my system refused to boot. After seemingly doing nothing for a while my computer would just drop into an emergency root console. In the mean time everything is up and running again, and here's what I had to do to make it boot again:

  • After reading many bug reports and forum entries about NFS mounts in fstab causing a system not to boot, I decided to take a look at my /etc/fstab. In /etc/fstab I had specified (amongst other things) mount points for cdrom, dvd, and up to two usb sticks:
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/dvdrw1 /media/dvd auto noauto,rw,user,exec 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /media/usbstick auto users,rw
/dev/sdc1 /media/usbstick2 auto users,rw
After commenting out all those lines, the system suddenly booted again. Despite the "missing" entries, KDE still manages to recognize USB sticks and while it might be unrelated, I noticed that now suddenly KDE is able to correctly play audio CDs -- something I had never managed before. The player would start but I never got any sound from it.


CUPS refused to start

Once the system booted again I hit the next problem: I couldn't print anymore since CUPS refused to come up. After searching the net, I saw more people having the same problem. In a lucky guess I looked in /etc/sysctl.conf and saw a line:

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1

I disabled that line and cups worked again! I then added that information to a bug record related to bringing up CUPS on systemd https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742668#76 . In the mean time other people have encountered the same issue:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2014/06/msg00355.html


No visual feedback during boot

This was the least of my problems initially, but after a while I missed the coloured OK's during startup.
Turns out /etc/default/grub contained a line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet"

after changing that to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

and running update-grub, my beloved colored OK's are back :)


Conclusion

All systemd versus SysVinit wars aside, I haven't seen other issues on my system so far. Keeping fingers crossed :)