How to make systemd kill or stop respawning the rsyslog daemon

systemd rsyslog
John Greene picture John Greene · Jan 14, 2018 · Viewed 9k times · Source

It is great that systemd can keep rsyslog daemon alive even when it dies.

But I am crafting a new rsyslog configuration file and need to start this rsyslog daemon in debug mode. Before I debug rsyslogd, I need to stop the production rsyslog daemon, so I executed:

systemctl stop rsyslogd.service

But that command doesn't stop rsyslog daemon. Killing it via Unix signal doesn't keep systemd from respawning rsyslogd:

kill -KILL <rsyslogd-pid>

Even executing systemctl mask rsyslogd.service doesn't stop the respawning.

How do I make systemd STOP respawning 'rsyslog' daemon so I can troubleshoot it using debug?

Answer

John Greene picture John Greene · Jan 14, 2018

Well, after reading this bug report link: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815862

This appears counter-intuitive...but the actual steps to perform is you have to stop TWO systemd units, and not just the rsyslog.service:

systemctl stop syslog.socket rsyslog.service

Problem solved.

Related questions

How can i use iptables on centos 7?

I installed CentOS 7 with minimal configuration (os + dev tools). I am trying to open 80 port for httpd service, but something wrong with my iptables service ... what's wrong with it? What am I doing wrong? # ifconfig/sbin/service iptables save bash: …

Read More
How to redirect output of systemd service to a file

I am trying to redirect output of a systemd service to a file but it doesn't seem to work: [Unit] Description=customprocess After=network.target [Service] Type=forking ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/binary1 agent -config-dir /etc/sample.d/server StandardOutput=/…

Read More
Fixing a systemd service 203/EXEC failure (no such file or directory)

I'm trying to set up a simple systemd timer to run a bash script every day at midnight. systemctl --user status backup.service fails and logs the following: backup.service: Failed at step EXEC spawning /home/user/.scripts/backup.sh: …

Read More