On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 5:03 PM Joey Dodson <jdodsoneleme...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hello list! > > > > Thanks in advance for any help or thoughts! > > > > Background: > > > > I have a system where many ‘/etc/systemd/system’ symlink paths got replaced > by files. Therefore, ‘systemctl enable’ no longer works for a majority of > services. Though somehow there are some services that appear to not have been > affected. This happened for everything in > ‘/etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants’ and it seems all/many of the > ‘*.target.wants’ directories. > > > > If I delete the hard files, then I can use ‘systemctl enable’ for that > service, but it’s not so simple. Many services have dependencies and aliases > and it will throw the following error message: > > > > ‘Failed to execute operation: Invalid argument’ > > > > And it may create the symlink for the main unit file, but the dependencies > and aliases have still failed. Therefore it’s going to leave the system in a > broken state unless I can get everything. > > > > Further context: > > > Last time the server was rebooted, it was unable to boot into any kernel, > including our rescue kernel. Only emergency mode was possible through editing > the grub boot options. Somehow the default target was no longer set to > ‘multi-user.target’, but we have no logical explanation for how that could > have happened. > > > > > > Questions: > > Has anyone seen something like this before? How could this have happened? We > suspected rsync/scp from another machine, but since there are some symlinks > unaffected I think that’s less likely. Is there any mechanism of systemd that > could have caused it? > Systemd has commands to list where the original unit files are located, but I > need the opposite. Is it possible to list the paths where symlinks will go > when using ‘systemctl enable’? The error message above is not descriptive and > according to search results, it could indicate that a service is masked, a > unit file has extra spaces, symlinks can’t be created or any number of > things. Without knowing the path for symlinks, I don't know which files to > delete to get it working again. > I saw there is a ‘-force’ option for ‘systemctl enable’, but it seems that it > will only overwrite symlinks, not hard files. Is there another way to > overwrite files in the intended symlink path? > Is there anything I’m missing here? I’ve never seen this before today and am > pretty stuck with how this could have happened and how to resolve it in a > thorough/holistic way. >
Well..the symlinks where restored from an archive that did not support symlinks? assuming you want all those services enabled again you could write a shell script that replaces hard files to symlinks.. It will happen again if you do not determine where that came from though. whatever did that needs a blowtorch.
