Comment 0 for bug 1596056

When invoke-rc.d is called on a systemd system, if the unit fails to start, you get output like:

Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/openafs-fileserver.service → /lib/systemd/system/openafs-fileserver.service.
Job for openafs-fileserver.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status openafs-fileserver.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.
invoke-rc.d: initscript openafs-fileserver, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing package openafs-fileserver (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1

The output shown here comes from systemctl itself, and is usually fine. The admin who ran systemctl can run those other commands to debug.

However, when called by invoke-rc.d, this output is usually seen only in a log file; maybe submitted in a bug report, maybe attached to something like an autopkgtest:

https://objectstorage.prodstack4-5.canonical.com/v1/AUTH_77e2ada1e7a84929a74ba3b87153c0ac/autopkgtest-yakkety/yakkety/armhf/o/openafs/20160624_174535@/log.gz

By the time someone looks at this log output, it is often too late to run those commands in order to debug the failure.

invoke-rc.d should call these commands for us on systemd unit failure, so that the relevant debugging information is included in the log where it can help.

We don't want to call 'journalctl -xe', which might leak information into the log from other jobs, but 'journalctl -x -u <this_unit>' may be appropriate.