initscript avahi-daemon, action "start" failed

[Alexander Balderson]

When installing maas-region-controller, avahi-deamon failed to install because it was it seemed to already be running.

$ apt-get -q install -y maas-region-controller
....
[1invoke-rc.d: initscript avahi-daemon, action "start" failed.
● avahi-daemon.service - Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Stack
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/avahi-daemon.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Sat 2018-09-15 19:42:29 UTC; 9ms ago
   Process: 22726 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/avahi-daemon -s (code=exited, status=255)
 Main PID: 22726 (code=exited, status=255)

Sep 15 19:42:29 leafeon systemd[1]: Starting Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Stack...
Sep 15 19:42:29 leafeon avahi-daemon[22726]: Daemon already running on PID 21868
Sep 15 19:42:29 leafeon systemd[1]: avahi-daemon.service: Main process exit.../a
Sep 15 19:42:29 leafeon systemd[1]: Failed to start Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Stack.
Sep 15 19:42:29 leafeon systemd[1]: avahi-daemon.service: Unit entered fail...e.
Sep 15 19:42:29 leafeon systemd[1]: avahi-daemon.service: Failed with resul...'.
Hint: Some lines were ellipsized, use -l to show in full.
dpkg: error processing package avahi-daemon (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of avahi-utils:
 avahi-utils depends on avahi-daemon; however:
  Package avahi-daemon is not configured yet.

[Jason Hobbs (jason-hobbs)]

In the previous package removal, we are seeing:

[10.244.40.30] out: Purging configuration files for avahi-daemon (0.7-3.1ubuntu1.1) ...
[10.244.40.30] out: rmdir: failed to remove '/var/run/avahi-daemon': Directory not empty

[Jason Hobbs (jason-hobbs)]

Subscribed to field-high as this is causing a lot of failures lately.

[Trent Lloyd (lathiat)]

Can you please give me more information about the environments this is failing in?

 (1) Are these production or testing deployments
 (2) Is it being installed to a container or a VM
 (3) Can you give me the full /var/log/syslog from the example case shown in the description or another reproduction
 (4) Can you give me a full run down of the steps to get into this state, e.g. the machine was deployed with a specific Ubuntu ISO and then the full list of commands used to that time, etc.

[Jason Hobbs (jason-hobbs)]

1) Testing
2) No, it's in baremetal
3) Attached.
4) The machine was deployed with maas - it's a bionic cloud image. We then install/configure maas, run some tests, and remove maas via purge, and repeat. This shows up sometimes on deployments after the initial one - avahi-daemon, or at least its pid file, is left in /var/run/avahi-daemon from a previous run. There are LOTS of commands run. The important ones seem like:

1) apt-get -q install -y avahi-utils maas-region-api maas-dns
2) apt-get -q autoremove --purge maas-common -y
3) apt-get -q autoremove --purge avahi-daemon -y
... repeat until failure

[Billy Olsen (billy-olsen)]

Avahi is not covered by field sla, so unsubscribing field-high

[Konstantinos Kaskavelis (kaskavel)]

Closing this due to inactivity (low number of occurrences, and no hit for more than one year)