On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 02:34:00PM -0400, Matthew Gabeler-Lee wrote: > On Sat, 14 Apr 2018, Stefan Fritsch wrote: > > > This seems to be a systemd bug. Changing PrivateTmp from true to false in > > apache2.service fixes the issue. But even with PrivateTmp it works for > > some time. It would be interesting what is the trigger to make it fail > > later on. > > Hmm ... I was having a problem on some systems where tmpreaper, in its > default configuration, will eventually delete all the directories systemd > creates to support PrivateTmp, which might explain this...
Just for the record, we've also tracked it down to the use of PrivateTmp (but I hadn't followed up on this bug since we haven't analysed this to full extent). The workaround deployed is here: https://github.com/wikimedia/puppet/commit/388d0141ef3b78471eb81b59e1ccb196adf49872 It's specific to our configuration for Mediawiki application servers, but those are fairly complex to begin with (e.g. there's various Mediawiki extensions which shell out to external binaries (e.g. to convert musical typesheets edited in Wikimedia projects)). I wouldn't call this a bug in systemd, it's probably something local in the setup of the various components using /tmp (and we don't have this problem on our non-mediawiki stretch Apache setups). Using PrivateTmp in apache.service by default seems totally sensible to me. As such, I'd recommend to simply close this bug. Anyone searching for that error message via a search engine will hopefully find it as a useful reference. Cheers, Moritz