9.10 Upstart Breaks Cron,Cups,SSH, etc...

[jwvraets]

Check if you have loopback interface in:
/etc/network/interfaces

there should be (at file top):
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

After I've added this, my services were back

j23tom, I did the above mentioned mod to /etc/network/interfaces and can confirm that on my system it does indeed do the trick (for ssh, cups and mysql that I have checked). Thanks ever so much. I owe you a beverage of choice if you ever get up this way.

JW

[Eksilius]

Tried downgrading upstart and not even that helped. I've tried everything suggested on the whole damn web but nothing works. I'm getting close to wiping my disk and go for a clean install. That did it on my older computer, which had the same issue. I just don't like to think of the efforts.

[Eksilius]

At last, an update for Upstart showed up in the update manager today and I was of course extatic. Downloaded, installed, and - bummer again! I'm really going nuts here. Is a fresh install really the only way out of this? Or is even that going to help!?

[muckblit]

I installed lucid on five hard drives.

All installs came with /etc/network/interfaces auto lo:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

That is NOT a fix because upstart causes so many other problems. I think it's a fine concept but who released upstart 0.6.3-10 as the standard init method when it disables services like ssh and dbus, consequently no audio, maybe no X login? Would someone please make their bank accounts public ?

upstart 0.6.3.11 or newer does not run ifup -a. upstart never runs services such as dbus or gdm or kdm. No audio! This is killing ubuntu. Normally a bug of this strategic magnitude would be fixed in minutes, not hours, not days or weeks. upstart messes up boot logging so you can't see what's going on(research bootlogd and grub options quiet=1 and kernel opt quiet with NO splash). X is may not load or you may get a hung X load, frozen mouse, sluggish X. You may boot to a console login or just to hung X with frozen mouse.

I tried pinning upstart to what karmic is using:

#/etc/apt/preferences
Package: upstart
Pin: version 0.6.3-10
Pin-Priority: 900

Unfortunately a newer version of libc6 was already in place. apt-get or dpkg wanted to delete a hundred packages that depend on ANY libc6 in order to downgrade upstart and libc6. At least I was asked if I really wanted to do that, and of course I did not. If you are coming from karmic, you have upstart 0.6.3.10 so you have the opportunity to pin that before your upgrade. As long as you stay in karmic, you are frozen at upstart 0.6.3-10 until this too may pass.

It's possible that some install iso has a way. I did see dbus and audio working with upstart 0.6.3-11, but then ext4 got hosed some way before I could figure out the diff. I don't know if that lucid good upstart install was desktop or alt iso beta2 daily. I'd like to think somebody is making progress. It's only scripting, not hard if those familiar with upstart and udev and inittab/sysvinit would just try. I can't afford food, only coffee and gasoline, so don't lecture me about putting MORE time in on this.

[RikoW]

Hi all,

I stumbled across this thread when my cups service spontaneous didn't start anymore, but could easily started by hand. None of the tricks posted here help. Other problems appeared as well like cpu scaling not taking the default settings.

When I fiddled with the kernel and boot processes I started to use concurrency to speed up the boot process by running scripts in parallel on the 2 cores of my CPU. That seemed to have screwed it up. After I removed that setting, everything is working again as expected with the last available version on upstart.

Check the scripts

/etc/init.d/rc
/etc/default/rcS

for a line saying

CONCURRENCY=shell

If you find one, you might want to try and replace it with

CONCURRENCY=none

and reboot.

Cheers,

Riko

[Eksilius]

Yesss!

Finally, at last, something that works also on my computer!

But honestly, CONCURRENCY=shell is a long-running trick for speeding up boot on multi-core processors. I've even seen it in printed books in shops. And before applying it on my Karmic install (I've used it since Hardy), I did make sure the various web pages giving speed-tweak hints were still recommending it. And it did work fine until Upstart 0.6.3-11 came.

I definitely need to follow this up in bug #511387, which I issued.

[muckblit]

Upstart makes boot quicker than it was with sysv.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/upstart 0.6.3-10
http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic-updates/upstart 0.6.3-11
http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/upstart 0.6.3-11build1

We can see that karmic is currently using upstart 0.6.3-10 which only has the worry of making sure /etc/network/interfaces has auto lo.

With karmic-updates in /etc/apt/sources.list, then the worry is that upgrading will move karmic users to upstart 0.6.3-11 and to a newer libc6 which(newer libc6) makes it very, very difficult to downgrade upstart because other newer packages depend then on newer lib6. Better karmic users pin their upstart to 0.6.3-10 for a while to keep from falling into the pit when /etc/apt/sources.list contains karmic-updates(synaptic shows checkmark for karmic-updates in repositories).

Sometimes upstart 0.6.3-11 works; sometimes not. I have a lucid 10.04 desktop live iso from January 12, 2010 (20100112.1) that has 0.6.3-11 and loads dbus, ssh, ifupdown eth0 OK, pulseaudio and gdm work because dbus is there. One could say that upstart 0.6.3-11 is not the problem! Somebody just has to do the scripting to come over to upstart from sysv. I may be able to tarball the /etc/init/ scripting that works there, and copy that over to my crippled no-service installations.

Some recent gdm scripting has gdm wait for dbus to load. That means our X will never start under gdm and the upstart no-services problem because dbus will never load.

http://www.mail-archive.com/lucid-ch.../msg04041.html
January 26, 2010 "convert openssh to upstart"...thus we don't have an upstart problem but only problems with services if they have not been revised to work with upstart!

[muckblit]

I used that Live iso from January 12 in which services start. It installs upstart 0.6.3-11. Services load, including gdm, cups, dbus, ssh. Then I pinned upstart version number before upgrading. Upgraded; services still load, but the upgrade installed upstart 0.6.3-11build1, in spite of a pin for 0.6.3-11. I had been assuming that -11build1 and -11ubuntu1 were "bad" and causing my no-service problem. Apparently it's the packages that depend on upstart that have to be fixed rather than 0.6.3-11 or -11build1 or previously assumed to be doomed -11ubuntu1.

gdm and openssh teams indicate on launchpad that they are working to adapt to upstart.

It's good to pin upstart_0.6.3-10 if you have just installed karmic but don't have karmic-updates(upstart_0.6.3-11) in your /etc/apt/sources.list or synaptic. 0.6.3-11 pin does not work, it upgrades to 0.6.3.11build1 anyway despite this pin:

#/etc/apt/preferences
Package: upstart
Pin: version 0.6.3-11
Priority: 900

...but 0.6.3-11build1 will work(services up) with the right install base even if that has 0.6.3-11.

About all I can do is poke around /etc/init to see if I can find diffs between 0.6.3.11* installs that do and don't work. Then maybe a tarball of a working /etc/init/ would fix broken situations! Other than that I seem to be just locating developer cliques that have released upstart-adapted deb packages for services. Outside looking in.

[dantonic]

Well downgrading upstart worked for me. thank you very much for the suggestion, I can finally use ssh the way I want to.

I am newer to ubuntu and linux in general.
I simply do not understand how or why a package like that could ever be put through. surely it must have been obvious that it broke so many features. What a waste of everyones time. Countless hours for me trying to fix these issues.

[citro_cell]

Check the scripts

/etc/init.d/rc
/etc/default/rcS

for a line saying

CONCURRENCY=shell

If you find one, you might want to try and replace it with

CONCURRENCY=none

and reboot.

Thank You!! Thank You!! After multiple reinstalls and searching through many different forums this is what fixed my problem!!