Bug#751585: systemd: opens emergency shell after prompting for unnecessary dm-crypt passwords

[Michael Gold]

severity 751585 normal
clone 751585 -1 -2 -3
retitle -1 systemd: shows unnecessary password prompts for encrypted disks
severity -1 normal
retitle -2 systemd: should print reason for starting emergency shell
severity -2 wishlist
retitle -3 systemd: emergency shell takes several minutes to start
severity -3 normal
thanks

On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 17:30:30 +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Thanks.
> I noticed that you don't have those crypt devices marked as noauto (or
> nofail) in /etc/fstab.
> This means, if they fail to show up during boot systemd will drop you in
> an emergency shell (which is what happened in your case).
> 
> Try booting with systemd where those devices are marked accordingly in
> fstab.

It turns that /media/bootkey was missing, and putting "nofail" there got
the system booting successfully.  This was just a regular unencrypted
USB flash drive, which had spontaneously zeroed itself a few months ago
but was still listed in my fstab.  Running journalctl showed a message
about it, but it wasn't obvious--there was some similarly-highlighted
text about a missing /bin/plymouth (apparently not an actual problem)
and a bunch of other verbosity that filled up the screen.

I'm reducing the severity because this is a configuration problem.  You
can close it if you want, or leave it open and try to detect situations
like this during installation or boot (since it works with sysvinit).

I'm splitting off some other bugs I noticed (see the attached
screenshot):
 * systemd shouldn't be pausing startup to show password prompts for
   anything marked "noauto" in crypttab, or anything with a keyfile
 * it should show an obvious message describing why it went into
   emergency mode
 * after printing "Welcome to emergency mode!", it took a minute or two
   before a password prompt was shown; but that prompt died (I guess)
   without accepting any keyboard input, and after another few minutes I
   got another welcome message and password prompt (it worked this time)

-- Michael
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