It's a general issue with templated unit files; I've had this happen as well, and could not figure out why the service had failed to start. It was because I had mistyped the instance name. As best I can tell systemd doesn't have any mechanism to restrict the instance names which can be used for a specific unit file, so it can't know that the requested instance cannot be started.
On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 2:46 AM Richard Hector <rich...@walnut.gen.nz> wrote: > > Hi all, > > Quoting from another thread: > > On 5/09/20 4:36 am, Lennart Poettering wrote: > > Unit instances can be activated on-the-fly without further prepartion > > or regsitration of the instance string or so. it's sufficient if the > > template unit exists. > > Is that preventable? > > I have some instance names that are easily typoed. When I start one with > the wrong name, it sticks around trying to restart for ever - or at > least till I notice it or reboot - where I'm much rather get an error > message and stop. > > For reference, this is with the openvpn-client@ (and maybe > openvpn-server@) units in Debian buster. Some of the content was > modified/overwritten by me, so it could well be a bug introduced by me. > > The typos are because my instances are based on hostname, which can > contain '-' but not '_'. Instance names can apparently not contain '-', > so I have to use '_' instead, but my muscle memory for my hostnames is > strong. > > I don't know if this is a result of the way the units are written, or an > inherent issue with systemd. > > Cheers, > Richard > _______________________________________________ > systemd-devel mailing list > systemd-devel@lists.freedesktop.org > https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel _______________________________________________ systemd-devel mailing list systemd-devel@lists.freedesktop.org https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
