Ubuntu 16.04 snapd service not working

[Yovan]

I have asked this in the snapcraft.io forum and there is no actual reply. So i take the onus to report the bug here.

I am running problem starting snapd.service with the following message running ‘journalctl -u snapd.refresh.service’ gives me:

systemd[1]: Starting Automatically refresh installed snaps...
snap[1606]: error: cannot communicate with server: Post http://localhost/v2/snaps: read unix at ->/run/snapd.socket: read: connection reset by peer
systemd[1]: snapd.refresh.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
systemd[1]: Failed to start Automatically refresh installed snaps.
systemd[1]: snapd.refresh.service: Unit entered failed state.
systemd[1]: snapd.refresh.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
systemd[1]: Stopped Automatically refresh installed snaps.
The process repeats a few times.

Running ‘journalctl -u snapd.service’ gives me the following;

systemd[1]: Starting Snappy daemon...
snapd[23523]: AppArmor status: apparmor is enabled and all features are available
snapd[23523]: AppArmor status: apparmor is enabled and all features are available
snapd[23523]: error: invalid character '#' looking for beginning of value
systemd[1]: snapd.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
systemd[1]: Failed to start Snappy daemon.
systemd[1]: snapd.service: Unit entered failed state.
systemd[1]: snapd.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
systemd[1]: snapd.service: Service hold-off time over, scheduling restart.
systemd[1]: Stopped Snappy daemon.
Running ‘snap --version’ gives me:

snap 2.30
snapd unavailable
series -
Running 'ls -la ‘/usr/lib/snapd’ for the snapd folder gives me:

total 46140
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 27 20:21 .
drwxr-xr-x 178 root root 12288 Jan 12 10:24 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5324 Oct 23 14:17 complete.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6243 Aug 24 14:46 etelpmoc.sh
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17 Dec 1 03:44 info
-rwsr-sr-x 1 root root 85832 Dec 1 03:48 snap-confine
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 21178072 Dec 1 03:48 snapd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2273 Dec 1 03:48 snapd.core-fixup.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 39864 Dec 1 03:48 snap-discard-ns
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3562392 Dec 1 03:48 snap-exec
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 13362448 Dec 1 03:48 snap-repair
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4027064 Dec 1 03:48 snap-seccomp
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4080112 Dec 1 03:48 snap-update-ns
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 852928 Dec 1 03:48 system-shutdown
This problem happens for the past 3 days with some unknown error due to snapd.service unable to parse ’ invalid character ‘#’ looking for beginning of value’.

Please give me advice to troubleshoot. Thanks.

[Yovan (navoytak)]

The link on snapcraft.io is here:
https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/ubuntu-16-04-snapd-fail-to-start/3529/3

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

After some investigation in the forum it turns out that this error was caused by file system corruption. Unfortunately there is little snapd can do in this case. I close the bug. Good luck with your disk!