Bug#759320: systemd fails to close user sessions with nonexistent home (nobody)

[Nicolas George]

Thanks for looking into it.

Le nonidi 9 fructidor, an CCXXII, Michael Biebl a écrit :
> I still get those error messages with v214 but it seems the session is
> cleaned up properly. I do no longer have any (sd-pam) processes for that
> user and no delay on shutdown.

I believe the difference is caused by this bug, present in v208 but fixed in
v214:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=749268

In v208, the failure and timeout happen at shutdown (or when the admin stops
the service explicitly). In v214, the failure and timeout happen immediately
when the "nobody" session finishes, and thus happens completely in
background. The service still goes into failure state, and I suppose that
can have subtle advert effects; it definitely looks unclean.

> That said, I guess we should fix the code to fall back to something safe
> like / if the CHDIR does not succeed resp. the directory does not exist.

I am not entirely sure this would be a good thing: having a nonexistent home
directory is made for preventing this kind of thing to happen.

In this particular case, I find it rather strange to try to invoke /bin/kill
instead of killing directly. I did not manage to find where it came from by
reading the code.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George
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