[Mageia-dev] systemd and non-systemd services question

Thu Sep 27 17:23:20 CEST 2012

I have a cauldron system with the Oracle Express Edition (oracle-xe) RPM 
+installed.  This has worked nicely in the past, with the simple change 
+that the /etc/init.d/oracle-xe script needs to have LSB headers added.
+
+I don't start the DB automatically at boot, but only when I need it for 
+testing.  Based on the creation date of the files in its log directory, 
+the last time it started was Aug 3.
+
+The database no longer starts.  Running the sysv script produces the 
+message "Starting oracle-xe (via systemctl)", and produces no errors, 
+but nothing happens.  "systemctl list-units | grep oracle" shows the 
+status of oracle-xe.service as "loaded active exited", but no Oracle log 
+file is created.  Moreover, there is no oracle-xe.service file anywhere 
+on my root partition.
+
+Issuing "systemctl start oracle-xe.service" issues no output. Running it 
+under strace shows an execve for /bin/systemctl, and later on an execve 
+for /usr/bin/systemd-tty-ask-password-agent, but very little else, and 
+nothing that even hints at actually trying to execute any oracle code.
+
+It seems like sometime after Aug 3 systemd changed in some way as to 
+cause the failure.  The system was built (and the oracle-xe rpm 
+installed) on Aug 2, and never gets touched after install (and the 
+addition of LSB headers).   I haven't had to start it for a while, so I 
+can't get it more precise than that.
+
+Any idea how to diagnose this ?  Does systemd keep logs anywhere ?
+