[systemd-devel] Manual start of user@<uid>.service failed with permission denied

[Lennart Poettering]

On Do, 07.12.23 18:29, Christopher Wong (Christopher.Wong at axis.com) wrote:

> Hi Lennart,
>
> We are doing the steps to start up a rootless docker. If I don’t set XDG_RUNTIME_DIR then I will get the below error:
>
> systemd[1925]: Trying to run as user instance, but $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
> is not set.

pam_systemd is responsible for setting this env var. Most likely you
are missing that from the PAM stack that is used by this user at .service
instance?

> The 503 is a system user. So, just to try it out, I created a user,
> which got the UID 1001. Using that UID gave me the same result as
> the 503.

It's a bad idea to run user stuff as system user.

Lennart

--
Lennart Poettering, Berlin