Description of problem: System configured with sssh with LDAP auth, home dirs on nfs. Local fs: / /var /export In login screen (runlevel 3) I only get: [ 90.537402]: systemd-logind[863]: failed to start unit:Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include:...[cut] then it just hangs forever. In runlevel 5 I only get a completely empty screen except background image, after giving username and password. What's really strange is going first to recovery mode (single to kernel command line), and then: service network start init 3 there. And I can do a root text login and then do init 5. And then X login works! Seem to be a race condition or timing issue or something? All updates installed. Even tried to install all testing updates, same result. It's a bit hard to debug the broken system, not being able to login. Any ideas?
I finally managed to reproduce the problem with one working virtual console letting me investigate the problem "live". The systemd-logind was hanging, however when stopping the syslog-ng service, systemd-logind started to work again. syslog-ng was set to log to remote log server in additional to local files. I no idea of the root cause for this issue.
syslog-ng has some problems working with the socket from systemd. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 742624 ***
Thanks for the hint Michal, issue seems identical. However, I would still wish systemd was a bit more robust. A system logger going wonky should not take down the whole system? It's also very hard to bring the system back to working order. The sys admin have to start in runlevel 1 or boot from CD (or similar) the get the system up and running.
(In reply to comment #3) > However, I would still wish systemd was a bit more robust. > > A system logger going wonky should not take down the whole system? "wonky" in this case means the syslog received an open file descriptor for /dev/log, but never read from it. The system will be in a bad state when such a thing happens, whether using systemd or not. You can produce such a situation on a system with no systemd by sending SIGSTOP to the syslog process. You'll start seeing the same symptoms.
Ok, thanks for your explanation.