Hi, this is a reply to bug 749019 and bug 881811, which stem from the same problem in the vnstat Debian package:
- /lib/systemd/system/vnstat.service defines User=vnstat as the user to run run vnstat under - The recommended way to start tracking a network interface and create its database file is: sudo vnstat -u -i ethX. This creates a db file owned by root:root, mode 0644. - Hence the vnstatd process cannot write to this file, and the db is never updated. The solution to this is to either chown -R vnstat:vnstat /var/lib/vnstat, or use sudo -u vnstat when creating the db. But all this requires manual intervention that is not documented anywhere. Ideally it would be automated or documented. We had a discussion on IRC on how to best fix this. At first there was an attempt to use DaemonUser "vnstat" DaemonGroup "vnstat" and removing User=vnstat from the systemd unit file. But even then you have to systemctl restart vnstat for it to fix the db file permissions. So also manual. I think a good and simple fix is to install the /var/lib/vnstat/ directory with sgid bit set. That way any file created there would have correct permissions. This bug prevents vnstat from working completly if the user doesn't do their research. So I would be happy for it to be fixed. Dear maintainer, please let us know how you'd prefer this to be fixed. Thanks
