Bug#800133: systemd: Jessie won't boot if a filesystem in /etc/fstab is missing

[Ritesh Raj Sarraf]

On Sun, 2015-09-27 at 11:18 +0200, folco wrote:
> Package: systemd
> Version: 215-17+deb8u2
> Severity: normal
> 
> Dear Maintainer,
> 
> You closed the bug #797039 without solving it.
> Here is the link: 
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=797039
> 
> So please, don't say that there is no bug before closing the report.
> 
> I tried to solve it myself in several ways, but I always get one of
> these three
> problems :
> - the system boots in emergency mode
> - the system has an invalid /etc/fstab
> - systemd hangs 90 seconds because it doesn't find my partition


In the last local meetup, I had another user (Vausdev) run into the
very same problem.

The problem was his incorrect entry in /etc/fstab, which led to an
incomplete boot, giving an impression that systemd was at fault. :-)

In his case, it was not just a 90 seconds hang. The system would only
boot in emergency mode.


After fixing his fstab, everything was normal again.

From that meetup, after root causing his bug, it was a clear impression
that it was difficult to debug such boot issues. From just the console
scrolls, it wouldn't have been possible. So I think there may be some
room for improvement here.

The reason might be the massive parallelization of services by systemd.
Because from those logs, for a user, it would be nearly impossible to
correlate the failure. Ofcourse, if the emergency shell can provide the
full journal access (I don't recollect if I tried that then), an
experienced systemd user should be able to dive into the logs.




-- 
Ritesh Raj Sarraf | http://people.debian.org/~rrs
Debian - The Universal Operating System
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