Was there a change of RemoveIPC semantics in Ubuntu 17.10?

[Renardo]

A few days ago I upgraded my Ubuntu 17.04 to 17.10. Afterwards I found that my Oracle XE would no longer start. alert_XE.log said things like

    ORA-27300: OS system dependent operation:semctl failed with status: 22
    ORA-27301: OS failure message: Invalid argument
    ORA-27302: failure occurred at: sskgpwrm1
    ORA-27157: OS post/wait facility removed
    ORA-27300: OS system dependent operation:semop failed with status: 43
    ORA-27301: OS failure message: Identifier removed
    ORA-27302: failure occurred at: sskgpwwait1

I found that /etc/systemd/logind.conf had the RemoveIPC line commented out. When I set RemoveIPC=no (the default is “yes”) and rebooted Linux, Oracle XE started fine, as it had before the upgrade. So I assume the 17.10 upgrade somehow made a change to the RemoveIPC semantics.

As I found that my previous installation also had a commented RemoveRPC it looks like Ubuntu 17.10 changed the default value from “no” to “yes”, and so breaks the Oracle XE installation. In this case I consider this behavior problematic, it should at least produce a clear warning during upgrade.

If the default value did not change I have no explanation of the phenomenon.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

"as it had before the upgrade" -> do you per chance have upgrade logs? e.g. /var/log/apt/* files?
To check if /etc/systemd/logind.conf conffile was overwritten. Local modifications should be preserved on upgrades and apt logs should mention if logind.conf was rewritten or not.

The defaults have not changed in artful. RemoveIPC in logind.conf has been yes since introduction in v211, which is pre-xenial.

There has been no changes to the defaults, so further investigation / logs are required from the affected system.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

Also, have you seen this bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xen/+bug/1671760 ?

[Renardo (renardo)]

Thanks, Dimitri John Ledkov, for your kind interest in my report and for your remarks. It's not so easy to experiment with my system during (European) daytime, I need it to make a living.

I had not seen bug 1671760 before (the number is somehow reminiscent of the Beagle Boys, isn't it?); I now looked at it but fail to see anything familiar. Sorry.

I now did what I maybe should have done before – check for reproducibility. Unfortunately it is not a problem at all. When I comment out the “RemoveIPC=no” in /etc/systemd/logind.conf and reboot Linux, Oracle XE fails. When I restore the entry and reboot, Oracle XE works. Just logging out and in again does not change anything.

I have no backups of the /etc directory but I have a second PC which has not been updated to Ubuntu 17.10 (so the name is “artful”, thanks, but I never remember such names). The “RemoveIPC” line is commented out there as well, which confirms your assumption that nothing was changed on upgrade. But Oracle had no problems running on this machine. And I doubt that upgrading to Ubuntu 17.10 did in any way touch Oracle XE; certainly Ubuntu is not supposed to know anything about Oracle (on the contrary, to be Oracle-ignorant).

In my /var/log/apt/ directory there are term.log and history.log files. I suppose they are not of much help. It looks like the question is not so much “why did Oracle stop working” but “why did it work before.”

If it's evident that the treatment of RemoveIPC did not change between Zesty and Artful I can live with the changed RemoveIPC and would agree to close the bug.

[Renardo (renardo)]

:I just wrote “Oracle-ignorant” but I think the correct expression is “Oracle-agnostic”. Sorry. Foreign languages have always been my problem.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for systemd (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]