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lyoko the
Asked: 2016-08-30 12:01:43 +0800 CST

systemd-journald Doesn't start at all

  • 772

After deleting my /var/log/journal by accident, I am unable to recover from the consequences. systemd-journald keeps failing over and over again every time I try to start it. when I run:

$ journalctl --verify
PASS: /run/log/journal/system.journal

which doesn't bring me one step closer to solve it because /run/log/journal/system.journal is created when I run /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-journald directly, which on it self outputs 

$ /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-journald
Failed to open runtime journal: Invalid argument

Things I have already tried:

  1. cleaning /var/log/journal and/run/log/journal`.
  2. copying /var/log/journal from another machine to both paths, running journalctl --verify to check them, and once again with --file flag.
  3. changing Storage setting in /etc/systemd/journald.conf to Storage=volatile just to disable /var/log/journald.
  4. Rebooting.
systemd journalctl journald

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    After renaming the hostname, deleting & recreating /etc/machine-id by running systemd-machine-id-setup and rebooting to apply these, systemd-journald came back to life!

    • 6

  2. Try deleting /var/log/journal in case that there are any remainders from previous restoring attempts. Then set Storage=persistent in /etc/systemd/journald.conf and reboot.

    Normally systemd should recreate /var/log/journal during reboot.

    If this doesn't help try

    mkdir -p /var/log/journal
systemd-tmpfiles --create --prefix /var/log/journal
    • 2

  3. Try: systemctl stop systemd-journald && strace systemctl start systemd-journald

    That should stream a lot of detail about what's going while the process is starting up. The final lines may provide a clue why it continues to fail.

    • -1