Some services not starting at boot

[jfollmann]

Hello, all. I'm hoping for an older and/or wiser user to point me in the right direction for troubleshooting a problem.

First things first, the platform: I am running Ubuntu 10.04 on my server. It started out as the desktop-oriented version (as I was even more of a newbie when I built it, and wasn't quite ready to go terminal-only). It still more or less is the desktop version, but a while back I did switch it over to the server kernel.

Some services don't appear to be starting when my server boots. I do not know exactly why - I'm looking for help in determining that.

Among the services that have failed at various times are apache2, smokeping, webmin, and 3dm2 (a configuration/monitoring daemon for 3Ware RAID controllers).

When I say they've failed to start, I'm not seeing any errors in the logs or anything. I just mean I notice that I can't access them - none of them seem to be logging any errors in /var/log/syslog or /var/log/messages. Oddly, if I manually start any of the affected services, it will come up just fine. And it will run without any apparent issue, until the next reboot. To my amateur mind, it seems more like the attempt to start them is never made, rather than the attempt being made and then erroring out.

Whatever the problem is, it started in the last few weeks. Because no errors are logged (as far as I know, anyway), and the problem only becomes apparent after a reboot, I am unsure of precisely when it began.

This next part might be significant: Just a couple weeks before I started noticing this, I was working on getting lcdproc working. In the end, I had to modify the priority of the init scripts for lcdproc and LCDd (lcdproc depends on LCDd being started first, but for some reason the default installations don't account for that, so I had to modify things so that LCDd always starts first). lcdproc is working just fine, but maybe something I did to the init scripts caused a problem?

While I basically understand the overarching idea of what I did (making sure a dependency starts before the thing that depends on it - pretty straightforward), I don't really know all that much about the init script system - I just used a walkthrough to get things done. So while I suspect this may have affected something, I don't know precisely how to check whether all is well. I can tell you that if I do an "ls" under /etc/rc3.d or /etc/rc6.d, or any of the other runlevels, it appears to me that entries for all the affected services are present, with (as I understand it) appropriate priority numbers. Whether that is all that needs to be verified, I don't know. Probably not.

It's also possible that the lcdproc thing is a red herring. I don't have anything that really points to my modifications there as the cause, other than that it seems to have been about the right time frame.

As you can probably tell, I don't consider myself a guru, but I've been using Linux as my primary OS for years now and am pretty comfortable on the command line. Please don't hesitate to ask for any information that might be helpful - if I know how to get it, I will, and if I don't know how, I'll figure it out or ask.

Any suggestions will be very much appreciated.

[kevdog]

A lot of ground to cover here. I believe Ubuntu in that edition had transitioned for startup services to use udev rather than system v scripts. I'm not 100% certain since I never installed 10.04.

How do you start these services now? What do you type in the command line to start these not-started services -- that should give me a clue.

If its udev that controls the startup scripts, its easy to modify each service where you could specify in the script to not start the service unless a dependency had been started.

[jfollmann]

I'm starting them manually with "sudo service [service name] start."


*Edited to reflect the ACTUAL command I'm using. I blame the limited visibility of typing on a phone. Or something.

[kevdog]

By your syntax, you are calling a udev script.

Let's just troubleshoot this one service at a time. Can you name one of the services that doesn't start and post the udev script for the service? The udev scripts are located in /etc/init/ and the name should be fairly self evident.

[jfollmann]

Hmmm... I wonder if we've stumbled upon the problem already. Of the 4 services I've noticed not starting, not one of them seems to have an associated .conf file under /etc/init. There are plenty of files there, just none that match the services in question.

I've already reinstalled the packages, which I would think would have put the right things in place here. Maybe not, though?

[kevdog]

How about we just tackle one of the services -- name one that isn't working, and I'll have a shot at what's going on in my install.

[hawkmage]

Yes Ubuntu 10 is primarily using Upstart scripts but it will still run the older System V scripts.

Also the command "service" is just a wrapper on the init/init.d scripts.

[jfollmann]

Ok, kevdog - let's go with apache2.

Hawkmage - yeah, I've been wondering about upstart. Specifically, once 12.04 becomes available, I wonder if it will only use upstart? If so, maybe some of my problems will be fixed simply because of things getting re-done when the system transitions over to upstart? Either that, or my current messed-up settings would get copied and my upstart configuration will fail just as badly as my current situation.

[jfollmann]

Well, if anyone's still listening to this thread, the recent update to 12.04 did not help this issue at all.

There has got to be a way to figure out what SHOULD be in place to start these things up. Once I know that, I can probably get things straightened out.

[CharlesA]

Are you just trying to see why apache isn't starting?