[systemd-devel] Unable to get service to wait for a mount before starting

[Andrei Borzenkov]

29.10.2024 10:03, Adam Nielsen wrote:
>>> I tried using RequiresMountsFor=/mnt/share however again, if it runs too
>>> early in the boot process the mount is not there and the unit fails to
>>> start, and is not retried (logs just say "Job myservice.service/start
>>> failed with result 'dependency'.")
>>
>> RequiresMountsFor only works if systemd knows about this mount point
>> which in practice usually means this mount point must be present in
>> /etc/fstab.
> 
> Thanks for the suggestion!  I do have it in /etc/fstab, although there
> are two:
> 
> server:/path /mnt/server/path nfs4 x-gvfs-hide,noauto,x-systemd.automount,timeo=15,soft,proto=tcp 0 0
> /mnt/server/path/subfolder /mnt/share none bind,_netdev,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.requires=/mnt/server/path 0 0
> 

x-systemd.automount makes no sense. You service has implicit Requires 
mnt-share.mount that will trigger mounting of both filesystems on boot 
anyway and won't have any idle timeout.

> This mounts an NFS path into a folder, then bind mounts a folder within
> it to /mnt/share.  I then use RequiresMountsFor=/mnt/share, since it's
> the second mount that has to happen before the systemd unit can start.
> 
> The mounts work (they always mount in the correct sequence) it's just
> that RequiresMountsFor= doesn't seem to like this set up.
> 

Instead of guessing you should have read the logs. I cannot reproduce it 
(without using NFS) and educated guess is - you do not have proper 
network-online.target implementation, so your NFS is attempted to be 
mounted before network setup is finished and this attempt fails.

But without logs we can speculate until the cows come home.