Detail is provided to avoid https://xkcd.com/979/ from happening to anybody in the future.
After a chat on IRC, we tested our a few scenarios, and found that _local_ users worked fine. The users that didn’t work were the LDAP users, which wouldn’t load systemd-user. I tried adding the one-shot at https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/nss_nis/blob/rawhide/f/nss_nis.conf to try a different restriction for the NSS service and systemd-user would work, however other things broke. We eventually determined that the end problem wasn’t systemd-user, but rather the local LDAP configuration, which is _old_, and uses services that probably should be replaced with sssd. That’s exactly what I did, and now sssd gets the users properly, and systemd-user starts with no problems. Of note is https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v248/NEWS, which has a warning that: NOTE: This has a chance of breaking nss-ldap and similar NSS modules that embed a network facing module into any process using getpwuid() or related cal Which is exactly what happened. This issue can be closed. > On Mar 30, 2021, at 12:22 PM, Michael Biebl <bi...@debian.org> wrote: > > Am 30.03.2021 um 20:14 schrieb Troy Telford: >> Package: systemd >> Version: 247.3-3 >> Severity: normal >> Dear Maintainer, >> * What led up to the situation? >> This was probably due to an apt update/upgrade. I haven't been configuring my >> system, but about two weeks ago, "systemd --user" stopped working entirely - >> none of the user units start up upon user login. The first thing I noticed is >> no sound, but it didn't take long to find that systemd wasn't running any >> user >> units. >> * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or ineffective)? >> Initially, I found that XDG_RUNTIME_DIR wasn't being set anymore -- so I >> added >> `export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u)` to my .xsessionrc. It didn't fix >> the issue for login, but I could at least run `systemd --user` and start up >> the >> processes after login. However, even that is broken now: I invariably get >> "Process org.freedesktop.systemd1 exited with status 1" >> /var/log/daemon.log has a corresponding message from DBUS about >> org.freedesktop.systemd1 being activated, but dying: >> Mar 30 12:08:01 pilot.pariahzero.net dbus-daemon[2025881]: [session uid=1000 >> pid=2025879] Activating service name='org.freedesktop.systemd1' requested by >> ':1.155' (uid=1000 pid=2433850 comm="systemctl --user --failed ") >> Mar 30 12:08:01 pilot.pariahzero.net dbus-daemon[2025881]: [session uid=1000 >> pid=2025879] Activated service 'org.freedesktop.systemd1' failed: Process >> org.freedesktop.systemd1 exited with status 1 >> The problem happens for all users on the system. >> I'll see if I can get more verbose logging to give any additional details >> about >> why org.freedesktop.systemd1 is exiting. If you know offhand, I'd definitely >> give it a try. > > What's the output of > apt-cache policy dbus-user-session > apt-cache policy dbus-x11