Re: Shutdown - 25 Years Later

On Fri, 18 Apr 2025 04:34:02 -0000 (UTC), Eli the Bearded wrote:

There are cases where systemd systems can have shutdown installed but it
doesn't work. I don't recall how it happened, but I borked something and
got systemd error messages out of the shutdown command.
One I have saved (from 2016) looks like this:
>
# shutdown -r now
Failed to start reboot.target: Failed to activate service 'org.freedesktop.systemd1': timed out
See system logs and 'systemctl status reboot.target' for details.
Failed to open /dev/initctl: No such device or address
Failed to talk to init daemon.
# systemctl status reboot.target
Failed to get properties: Connection timed out
#

Never encountered anything like that. In the earlier days of systemd,
I might hit that notorious “waiting for jobs” message. It might have a
2-minute timeout, only when it got down to zero, it would start over
from 2 minutes again.

Just having a look at what your above situation might be about:

    root@theon:~ # ls -l /dev/initctl
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Apr 13 17:40 /dev/initctl -> /run/initctl

So this is a named pipe used for communicating with init. Why would it
be deleted? Because there is no way to stop the init process without
bringing down your system (pid 1 is special that way). Perhaps
something else deleted the pipe. If it was just the symlink that was
removed, it should have been possible to put it back.

As for why reboot.target was trying to activate what looks like a
D-Bus service:

    root@theon:~ # systemctl show reboot.target | grep -i want
    Wants=plymouth-reboot.service plymouth-switch-root-initramfs.service

Can’t see anything that might be related to D-Bus there, at least not
on my current version.

# systemctl status reboot.target
Failed to get properties: Connection timed out
#

Interesting that the message here was not “no such device or address”.
Looks like it was using a different communication channel to
communicate with systemd. But it’s the same systemd process, running
as pid 1 under the /sbin/init alias.