[systemd-devel] Text input on startup (tty-force) disabling after a few seconds

[Natanji]

Thanks everyone for pointing me in the right direction. I managed to
solve the problem with your help; short report incoming in case anyone
is interested.

Simon's suggested approach worked quite nicely just right out of the
box, however it didn't fix the problem. In fact, my old script still
does the trick as well, but using systemd-ask-password is probably a
*much* better idea instead of my crude scripting approach so thanks for
that.

Tom's idea of using /etc/crypttab was a good one, but sadly I did not
find any way to tell it to open the TC partition as a system volume
(which is exhibited by tcryptrOpen's --tcrypt-system option).

In the end I wasn't able to find out which programs grabbed the tty from
my script, even with the additional logging Lennart suggested. I thought
it would be enough to put Before=multi-user.target but somehow that
didn't work. So now I just opted for using cryptsetup.target as
WantedBy, since the system is obviously in such an early state of
operation then that programs will keep the tty. I also tested that
cryptsetup can still be used in conjunction with this truecrypt service.

Below is the unit file for truecrypt that I use now; note that the
script now resides in /etc/ because this early in the boot process /home
is not mounted yet, so I had to change the location. The mentioned
unmount service just calls truecrypt -d, btw.

Thanks everyone, it's almost 3am now and I'll be going to bed. :P
Natanji

-------------------

[Unit]
Description=Mount Truecrypt-encrypted filesystems
ConditionFileIsExecutable=/usr/bin/truecrypt
Before=local-fs-pre.target
DefaultDependencies=false

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/bin/bash /etc/truecrypt_mount
RemainAfterExit=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=cryptsetup.target
Also=truecrypt-unmount.service

On 06/20/2013 09:05 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Wed, 19.06.13 14:52, Natanji (natanji at gmail.com) wrote:
> 
>> Hi everyone,
>> I'm somewhat new to systemd and have a problem. I would like to run a
>> custom script with systemd on startup that will ask me for a password
>> and mount a Truecrypt volume with it. The script and unit file I wrote
>> can be found below.
>>
>> Now, this setup does work *somewhat* - basically it will ask me for my
>> Truecrypt password on startup and do the mounting as it should. But when
>> I wait a few seconds during startup, entering the password no longer
>> works. I just have a few seconds after the password prompt appearing to
>> enter it; if I wait 5-10 seconds nothing will happen anymore.
>>
>> That seems like weird and unintended behaviour to me. Is this a bug, or
>> can you point me in the right direction about what I'm doing wrong if I
>> want some sort of keyboard interaction during system startup with
>> systemd? I mean, that is a useful and sometimes needed feature, right?
> 
> As others already mentioned using systemd-ask-password is probably the
> better approach. That said, my guess is that something else also wants
> to take possession of the tty. Have you tried to boot with
> systemd.log_level=debug systemd.log_level=kmsg to see what else tries to
> run when your input is taken away?
> 
> Lennart
>