Ubuntu – Why isn’t the upstart service starting on system boot

bootserverupstart

Following on from this question, I have written a simple upstart service (/etc/init/pms.conf) for my headless Ubuntu Server 11.04 box as follows:

start on filesystem and net-device-up IFACE=eth0
stop on runlevel [016]
respawn

exec /home/administrator/pms-current/PMS.sh

I can start (or stop) this service at will from the command line:

service pms start

And I can see that it is indeed running.

However, when I first boot my machine the service does not start. If I SSH into the box and check the service status I get:

$ service pms status
pms stop/waiting

My question is why is this happening? Why isn't my service starting on boot?

UPDATE 1: unsure whether my service was being started and subsequently dying or just wasn't being start at all, I added the following to PMS.sh:

echo "STARTED" > $STARTLOG

This obviously just gives me something to look for. I tested this by starting the service myself and then checking start.log. I then deleted the start.log and rebooted. It wasn't there after the restart, so it seems as though upstart definitely isn't starting my service. I suppose it could be dying at an earlier point in the process, but that seems rather unlikely given the simplicity of it all.

UPDATE 2: I've just upgraded to 11.10 which includes an upstart upgrade, but this problem still occurs.

UPDATE 3: As requested, I've booted with --debug. The output of cat /var/log/syslog | grep init is too long to place in the question, but you view it here.

UPDATE 4: More logs, this time the upstart conf is included at the top. Run 1 and run 2.

Best Answer

I would recommend increasing the verbosity of the job, e.g. by using pre-start/post-start entries.

pre-start script
  logger "pre-start for myprog"
end script

post-start script
  logger "post-start for myprog"
end script

# and for PMS itself:
script
  logger "just before executing PMS"
  exec /home/administrator/pms-current/PMS.sh
end script

Further information at http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/

Also have a look at http://upstart.ubuntu.com/wiki/Debugging

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