cpanel support pointed out to us our symlinks are broken in /var/run/systemd/units
“ls -lah /var/run/systemd/units” shows flashing red for broken symlinks
Since this is not a direct cpanel issue they can’t assist us with but curious if anyone else has had this before and if so what did you do to resolve?
We are hoping yum reinstall * or just a restart will fix it but want to get some feedback first before trying that incase things don’t come backup.
Oddly enough this issue seems to be unique since there are no similar posts in any searches we tried.
Regardless of how this turns out we will post an update and hopefully that helps out the next person with this problem.
I have several fully functional Alma and all the symlinks in their /run/systemd/units are indeed dangling.
More interestingly, the name of each link has prefix invocation: and the “pointed to name” is a long hex number:
$ ls -l /run/systemd/units | head -4
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 32 Jul 11 16:07 invocation:accounts-daemon.service -> 5e592302de1d4b438f207debba6f4e07
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 32 Jul 11 16:07 invocation:alsa-state.service -> 2f7a3a6e20e2443abb4f5a0a77640129
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 32 Jul 11 16:07 invocation:atd.service -> 41b58cd11b1b4b79bb008694c215b849
Furthermore, the /run (/var/run is just a symlink to /run) is a mounted tmpfs, in RAM and created on boot.
I’d guess that systemd has these symlinks not to point somewhere, but to store the hex data. Therefore, the dangling links are by design?
What problem cpanel support thinks to be a result of these symlinks?
They got back to me and apologized for the incorrect information. I will leave this up though incase someone else in the future panicks over “broken symlinks”. Systemd really does seem like black magic in how it works sometimes.
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