Bug#887556: non deterministic behavior of network-online.target

[Vladislav Kurz]

On 01/17/18 23:00, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Am 17.01.2018 um 22:11 schrieb Michael Biebl:
> 
>> It's not systemd that pulls in network-online.target. You should contact
>> the ifupdown maintainers why apparently network-online.target does not
>> work for you.
> 
> btw, in your syslog.fail, it seems like network-online.target is not
> started at all. Either your log is incomplete or something else prevents
> this target from being pulled in.
> 
> You should check, if you have any dependency loops (you mentioned custom
> services) which could result in services/targets not being started.
> 
> For that add systemd.log_level=debug to the kernel command line and follow
> 
> https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/193714/generic-methodology-to-debug-ordering-cycles-in-systemd
> 

Hello Michael,

Thanks for the link. You were right, there was a loop introduced by our
script. I had to use "journalctl -b" to find it.

Now I consider a bug the fact that this information was not shown in
syslog. Please keep in mind that there are many many admins who grew up
on the fact that EVERYTHING important is in syslog. Now with systemd we
have to use some special tool - journalctl, which to my great surprise
contains more information, that is not stored anywhere else. I just
wonder why? Why there is something that duplicates the function of
syslog? Why is this information (ordering cycle) not written to sysylog.
This is something that shoud definitely have at least warning level of
importance, not debug.

Aside from that, it would be nice, if "systemctl enable something" would
check the dependencies and ordering, and tell me immediately that I have
created a cycle or that some dependency cannot be satisfied. That would
save us several hours of despair and anger. Also it would probably
reduce the number (at least by 2) of sysadmins, who think that systemd
is ... (erm. fit your favourite curse).

-- 
Best Regards
        Vladislav Kurz