Bug#933370: chrony won't start

[Vincent Blut]

Control: merge -1 883241
Control: reassign -1 systemd
Control: tags -1 - moreinfo

Dear systemd maintainers,



What we currently have in Stretch and Buster is:








¹ https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/13136

On Fri, Aug 02, 2019 at 09:59:59AM -0700, Ross Boylan wrote:

We have found out in #902026 that the use of “Conflicts=” does not prevent systemd-timesyncd and chrony to run at the same time, those two bug reports that I’m reassigning to systemd seem to also be related to the way the “Conflicts=” setting works. - systemd-timesyncd runs by default unless another NTP daemon is installed on the system through the use of the “ConditionFileIsExecutable=” condition. - all the other implementations of the NTP protocol conflict with systemd-timesyncd. The current state of affairs seems to render both systemd-timesyncd and chrony becoming inactive on some systems. Concerning systemd-timesyncd, this is not surprising as “ConditionFileIsExecutable=!/usr/sbin/chronyd” is obviously not met. To make chrony active at startup on those systems, one has to either completely disable systemd-timesyncd or override chrony’s unit file to drop the “Conflicts=systemd-timesyncd.service” setting. Thankfully there is some work done¹ upstream which may improve the situation.

Removing systemd-timesyncd from chrony's Conflicts directive worked.
Some comments and details below, with more in the attached log.

Thank you for testing Ross.

>I did systemctl disable systemd-timesyncd and now chrony runs (and
>stays running) on startup.

Disabling systemd-timesyncd was guaranteed enough to succeed. That shows
that chrony is probably not at fault here. However, before merging this
bug report with #883241 and reassigning them to systemd, I would really
appreciate if you could check what’s happening by removing
systemd-timesyncd.service from the “Conflicts=” line in the chrony unit
file.

Note that I would totally understand that you refuse to run some tests
again! I certainly do not want to burden you.

If you accept to run these tests, then:

# Reenable systemd-timesyncd
# systemctl enable systemd-timesyncd.service

# Edit chrony’s unit file
# systemctl edit --full chrony.service

That will invoke an editor. From there, remove
“systemd-timesyncd.service” from the “Conflicts=” line. Save & exit!

I did this, also inserting the
  Wants=time-sync.target
  Before=time-sync.target
directives into the new file.  I left the override file that has those
directives too; not sure if it gets checked if I've overridden the
whole file.

It does. Look for the “Drop-In:” line when running:
$ systemctl status chrony.service


$ systemd-delta --type extended

Alternatively, you can get a list of *.conf files in drop-in directories by running:

# Restart the system and report chrony’s status here (ditto for
systemd-timesyncd)

See attached, which was done with systemd.log_type=debug.  It also
gives the contents of the configuration files.

It worked properly: chrony was active on startup.

Thanks again!

Ross

Cheers,
Vincent

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