Bug#1011103: inn2: Unable to start inn2 status=238/STATE_DIRECTORY error

[Richard Landster]

Package: inn2
Version: 2.6.4-2
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***

We are building a bullseye replacement of a buster server that uses inn2 to
act as a local usenet server. When we try to start the service using
"systemctl start inn2.service" we get this error message:

? inn2.service - InterNetNews
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/inn2.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Fri 2022-05-13 15:28:34 PDT; 18s ago
Docs: man:innd(8)
Process: 3284 ExecStart=/usr/lib/news/bin/rc.news (code=exited, status=238/STATE_DIRECTORY)
Main PID: 3284 (code=exited, status=238/STATE_DIRECTORY)
CPU: 1ms

May 13 15:28:34 usenet-dev.stanford.edu systemd[1]: Starting InterNetNews...
May 13 15:28:34 usenet-dev.stanford.edu systemd[3284]: inn2.service: Failed to set up special execution directory in /var/lib: Not a directory
May 13 15:28:34 usenet-dev.stanford.edu systemd[3284]: inn2.service: Failed at step STATE_DIRECTORY spawning /usr/lib/news/bin/rc.news: Not a directory
May 13 15:28:34 usenet-dev.stanford.edu systemd[1]: inn2.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=238/STATE_DIRECTORY
May 13 15:28:34 usenet-dev.stanford.edu systemd[1]: inn2.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
May 13 15:28:34 usenet-dev.stanford.edu systemd[1]: Failed to start InterNetNews.

Starting the service with /etc/init.d/inn2 does _not_ result in an error.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 11.3
APT prefers stable-updates
APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-13-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU thread)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/bash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages inn2 depends on:
ii cron [cron-daemon] 3.0pl1-137
pn inn2-inews <none>
ii libc6 2.31-13+deb11u3
ii libcrypt1 1:4.4.18-4
ii libdb5.3 5.3.28+dfsg1-0.8
pn libmime-tools-perl <none>
ii libpam0g 1.4.0-9+deb11u1
ii libperl5.32 5.32.1-4+deb11u2
pn libpython3.9 <none>
ii libsasl2-2 2.1.27+dfsg-2.1+deb11u1
ii libssl1.1 1.1.1n-0+deb11u1
ii libsystemd0 247.3-7
ii lsb-base 11.1.0
ii perl 5.32.1-4+deb11u2
ii perl-base [perlapi-5.32.1] 5.32.1-4+deb11u2
ii postfix [mail-transport-agent] 3.5.6-1+b1
ii procps 2:3.3.17-5
pn time <none>
ii zlib1g 1:1.2.11.dfsg-2

inn2 recommends no packages.

Versions of packages inn2 suggests:
pn gnupg1 <none>
pn libgd-perl <none>
ii libkrb5-3 1.18.3-6+deb11u1
ii wget 1.21-1+deb11u1

[Marco d'Itri]

On May 16, Richard Landster <deb...@lewenberg.com> wrote:

> May 13 15:28:34 usenet-dev.stanford.edu systemd[3284]: inn2.service: Failed to set up special execution directory in /var/lib: Not a directory
> May 13 15:28:34 usenet-dev.stanford.edu systemd[3284]: inn2.service: Failed at step STATE_DIRECTORY spawning /usr/lib/news/bin/rc.news: Not a directory

I think that there is something unusual in your system: how do /var/
and /var/lib/ look like?

> Starting the service with /etc/init.d/inn2 does _not_ result in an error.

I do not understand this, because the init script sources
/lib/lsb/init-functions which sources
/lib/lsb/init-functions.d/40-systemd which makes it just run systemctl
anyway.

--
ciao,
Marco

[deb...@lewenberg.com]

On 5/16/2022 3:06 PM, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On May 16, Richard Landster <deb...@lewenberg.com> wrote:
>
>> May 13 15:28:34 usenet-dev.stanford.edu systemd[3284]: inn2.service: Failed to set up special execution directory in /var/lib: Not a directory
>> May 13 15:28:34 usenet-dev.stanford.edu systemd[3284]: inn2.service: Failed at step STATE_DIRECTORY spawning /usr/lib/news/bin/rc.news: Not a directory
> I think that there is something unusual in your system: how do /var/
> and /var/lib/ look like?

usenet-dev:/etc/news# ls -lrtd /var
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 May 13 13:34 /var
usenet-dev:/etc/news# ls -lrtd /var/lib
drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 4096 May 13 15:28 /var/lib
usenet-dev:/etc/news# ls -lrtd /var/lib/news
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 May 13 13:19 /var/lib/news -> /var/spool/news/db

usenet-dev:/etc/news# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 796M 1.5M 795M 1% /run
/dev/sda1 15G 2.5G 12G 18% /
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
/dev/sda3 1007M 2.0M 954M 1% /var/cache/openafs
AFS 2.0T 0 2.0T 0% /afs
/dev/sdb1 196G 77G 110G 42% /var/spool/news

>
>> Starting the service with /etc/init.d/inn2 does _not_ result in an error.
> I do not understand this, because the init script sources
> /lib/lsb/init-functions which sources
> /lib/lsb/init-functions.d/40-systemd which makes it just run systemctl
> anyway.
>

You are correct, of course. I made a copy of /etc/init.d/inn2 called
/etc/init.d/inn2-custom and ran that without the error the systemd
version gave me. Sorry for the confusion.

In any event I have found the issue. As you can see from the above
/var/lib/news is a symbolic link. In the service file StateDirectory is
set to news which resolves to /var/lib/news. It seems that systemd does
not like StateDirectory to be a symbolic link. Lesson learned.

Please close this issue.