Description of problem: When using ProtectHome=yes in a service unit file, the service will fail to start if the /home directory is a symlink. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): systemd 231 How reproducible: This is easily reproduced by creating a symlink to another directory as /home. Default services like systemd-hostnamed and systemd-localed will fail to start with error 226/NAMESPACE. Steps to Reproduce: 1. mv /home /foo 2. ln -s /foo /home 3. systemctl restart systemd-hostnamed.service Actual results: The service fails to start with error: "Failed at step NAMESPACE spawning /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-hostnamed: Too many levels of symbolic links" Expected results: Service starts normally, chasing the symlink to the true location. Additional info: This is fixed in systemd 232 by Poettering himself under issue #3867: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3867 I have not tested, but I suspect the read-only option will also be affected.
To clarify, this bug breaks autofs-based network home folders. This bug could be worked around with a null or network mount of the home directory, but systemd-tmpfiles-setup requires access to this folder pre-network, so adding it to fstab as an NFS or null mount to an autofs mount causes a chicken-and-egg problem, and the entire operating system will not boot, dropping to dracut shell. I have found no reasonable workaround without modifying the service files to disable ProtectHome, modifying the systemd-tmpfiles-setup service to occur after the home folder is mounted (causing several other issues in the boot process), or changing user home folders to somewhere other than /home, which completely defeats the purpose of ProtectHome in the first place. This is fixed in systemd 232, and I have verified by building and installing v232 from systemd on github. After installing, the system boots normally and all systemd-* services function with ProtectHome=yes set in their service file. Please pull systemd 232 or above into Fedora 25.
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Fedora 25 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2017-12-12. Fedora 25 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. If you are unable to reopen this bug, please file a new report against the current release. If you experience problems, please add a comment to this bug. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.