Bug 678006

Summary:	init scripts output is totally suppressed when running them from the shell
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Simo Sorce <ssorce>
Component:	systemd	Assignee:	Lennart Poettering <lpoetter>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	15	CC:	lpoetter, metherid, mschmidt, notting, plautrba
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2011-02-16 21:56:16 UTC	Type:	---
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Description Simo Sorce 2011-02-16 13:41:06 UTC

All init scripts output is suppressed when you try to start/stop/restart/reload a service as root after boot.

# service foo restart:
Restarting foo (via systemctl): [OK]

This is all the output you get no matter what the init script prints out for the user to see.
This is especially bad when the init script tries to report an error to the user, as the error is lost and understanding what is wrong becomes much harder.

Comment 1 Lennart Poettering 2011-02-16 21:56:16 UTC

Yes, we suppress this output. Since we spawn services in a completely clean execution context detached from the user context services do not have access to the tty that the user happened to start the software on. This is a good thing and one of the good things about systemd: we do not inherit any process properties, resource limits, yadda yadda from the user running "systemctl start".

If a service fails to start the reason please log details to syslog as we plan to hook up "systemctl status ..." to syslog sooner or later.

By setting SysVConsole=yes in /etc/systemd/system.conf you can redirect sysv output to /dev/console. Which is half a replacement for what you are looking for.

I will close this bug since I don't think services should never get access to the tty a user happened to start "systemctl start" from. And the right place for details about service failure is syslog.