Linux Questions

1070 readers

1 users here now

Linux questions Rules (in addition of the Lemmy.zip rules)

stay on topic
be nice (no name calling)
do not post long blocks of text such as logs
do not delete your posts
only post questions (no information posts)

Tips for giving and receiving help

be as clear and specific
say thank you if a solution works
verify your solutions before posting them as facts.

Any rule violations will result in disciplinary actions

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

[Solved] How can I make a custom .service run as root? (reddthat.com)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/21668140

I have a VPN daemon that needs to run before the client will work. Normally, this would have been set up automatically by its install script, but the system is immutable.

I've created the systemd service via sysyemctl edit --force --full daemon.service with the following parameters:
[Unit] 
Description=Blah
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=root
Group=root
ExecStart=/usr/bin/env /path/to/daemon

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
I've verified that the daemon is actually executable, and it runs fine when I manually call it via sudo daemon. When I try to run it with sudo systemctl enable --now daemon.service, it exits with error code 126.

What am I missing?

Edit: Typo, and added the relevant user and group to the Service section. Still throwing a 126.

Solution: the system wanted /usr/bin/env in ExecStart to launch the binary. The .service file above has been edited to show the working solution.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Good to hear that it worked.
To explain env, typically when systemd is running a service it only provides a very minimal environment. When using env it passes more of the environment variables and whatnot from userspace, so it's likely that the binary daemon was looking for specific environment variables and it returned an empty string and that's what caused error, it's also useful if the daemon's location changes during runtime or if it's not in a standard location.