[systemd-devel] [PATCH] journald: Log error when failed to get machine-id on start

[Kay Sievers]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Olivier Brunel <jjk at jjacky.com> wrote:
> Can help since the journal requires /etc/machine-id to exists in order to start,
> and will simply silently exit when it does not.
> ---
> Not sure if the behavior is known/expected or a bug, but when e.g. booting a
> system with a read-only rootfs where /etc/machine-id doesn't exist, the journal
> would just silently fail (over & over) with no indication of why (even at debug
> log_level), and regardless of the Storage option (i.e. even with Storage=none).

Just put an empty file as /etc/machine-id, if you really cannot set it
up properly, systemd will mount a tmp file with a randome machine-id
there, and all should work.

It's not an optimal setup, you will have to deal with side-effects,
like if you have a writable /var and the journal will use the
machine-id as the directory name.

There is more than the journal that will fail, systemd just mandates a
working machine-id.

Kay