Shepherd fails to start in user session ~50% of the time

Hi Guix!

I've been using Guix on Archlinux for a little while now, and ever since

I've started using Guix Home on my laptop to start up user-level

services I've been having the issue that about 50% of the time when I

boot my laptop shepherd fails to start.

My .xsession-errors says:

and looking at my shepherd log:

It looks like it starts twice and then exits both, but I'm not sure why.

I'm guessing it's the ~/.guix-home/activate and

~/.guix-home/on-first-login that are trying to start it.

I'm not sure what other information I can provide you that will help, so

please let me know!

Cheers,

Tom

Hi,

Andrew, does the bug report below ring a bell?

https://issues.guix.gnu.org/57844

(I haven’t hit that problem myself.)

Ludo’.

Tom Willemse <tom@ryuslash.org> skribis:

On 2022-10-19 18:21, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

Yes, I don't remember if I created a thread on that (probably not) or

just discussed it in some chat, but when shepherd stops it doesn't clean

up its socket file, so you can't start shepherd again until manually

remove socket.

Checked it right now:

I found it out, when was experimenting with the place, where I start

shepherd https://issues.guix.gnu.org/57692. To inherit graphical

environment variables I start it by sway compositor, not login shell and

if in addition to sway session I login on another tty, elogind won't

remove XDG_RUNTIME_DIR => shepherd/socket is not removed => shepherd

fails to start after sway restart.

~/.guix-home/activate should be launched only by guix home reconfigure,

so it shouldn't be touched during startup of the session at all, also

they both have a condition, which must prevent the start of shepherd if

socket exists.

Tom, can you show your startup scripts, please (like xsession or

whatever you use for starting graphical environment)? Sharing home

environment config can be useful as well. Do you use some display/login

manager?

--

Best regards,

Andrew Tropin

Hi,

Andrew Tropin <andrew@trop.in> skribis:

Right, but in the context of Guix Home, it should be started only once

anyway, right?

Thanks,

Ludo’.

On 2022-10-20 23:44, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

Right.

--

Best regards,

Andrew Tropin

Hey!

Thanks for getting back to me on this! :)

Andrew Tropin <andrew@trop.in> writes:

Yeah I know that they both have a check for the pid file, I remember

finding your bug report and patch earlier and hoping that it would fix

my issues, although now I understand that this would never have helped.

I thought that they might still both try to start shepherd, since

neither check nor execution of shepherd is atomic, so I figured they

might end up both starting shepherd, one creating the pid and starting,

the other failing to create it and crashing, but I couldn't think of why

the first one would stop as well then. Anyway, I guess that is

completely wrong if they don't actually ever get run at the same time :)

My ~/.xinitrc is literally just:

exec /gnu/store/rl6f55i52lldzmbgg6z0ywr41ni4kbjg-herbstluftwm-0.9.4/bin/herbstluftwm --autostart /gnu/store/lqif0y90y7ipvf9aakdjisygnffk4999-autostart

I use the lightdm display manager installed with the Archlinux package

manager.

My home configuration on my laptop should be based on this:

It's spread across a few files, so if there's anything specific you want

to know please tell me, or if you need it in a different format I can

provide that too, I figured this would be the easiest way.

Thanks for your help!

Cheers,

Tom

Hi all,

Not sure if it is relevant, but I have often had this problem, and it

has always been from an orphaned syncthing process. I.e, the user login

session which has my guix home services running in it ends, but the

syncthing process is not terminated. Then I start a new login, and it

tries to start a NEW syncthing service, and gives this same error.

You can check this (next time syncthing fails to start) with:

ps -e | grep syncthing

Hope this helps,

Zacchae

Oh wow, should have read closer. That's a shepherd socket, not a syncthing

socket. (happened across this thread searching syncthing)

Please Disregard,

Zacchae