Mosquitto fails to auto-start at boot

ARM Technical Assistance
1

Hello, I installed mosquitto (version 2.0.8 which is the latest) and enabled auto start with sudo systemctl enable mosquitto.service.
However, it fails to start automatically after reboot with this error:

    systemctl status mosquitto
    ● mosquitto.service - Mosquitto MQTT Broker daemon
         Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/mosquitto.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
         Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Fri 2021-03-26 12:01:14 CET; 48s ago
        Process: 638 ExecStart=/usr/bin/mosquitto -c /etc/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
       Main PID: 638 (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

    mar 26 12:01:14 nas systemd[1]: mosquitto.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 5.
    mar 26 12:01:14 nas systemd[1]: Stopped Mosquitto MQTT Broker daemon.
    mar 26 12:01:14 nas systemd[1]: mosquitto.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
    mar 26 12:01:14 nas systemd[1]: mosquitto.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
    mar 26 12:01:14 nas systemd[1]: Failed to start Mosquitto MQTT Broker daemon.

It is not really helpful, is it?
If I start it manually with sudo systemctl start mosquitto.service it works.
Can you please help me to debug this problem? Could it be something permission-related?

Thanks,
Andrea

EDIT
I tried running the unit’s command and it appears to work correctly:
sudo -u mosquitto /usr/bin/mosquitto -c /etc/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf. It starts and I am able to see connections and publish messages.

Permissons look also good, at least to me:

    sudo ls -als /etc/mosquitto/
     4 drwxr-xr-x  2 mosquitto root  4096 23 mar 14.47 .
     4 drwxr-xr-x 74 root      root  4096 23 gen  2013 ..
     4 -rw-r--r--  1 mosquitto root   230  6 mar 15.55 aclfile.example
    40 -rw-r--r--  1 mosquitto root 39393 22 mar 10.01 mosquitto.conf
    40 -rw-r--r--  1 mosquitto root 39196  6 mar 15.55 mosquitto.conf.pacnew
     4 -rw-r--r--  1 mosquitto root    23  6 mar 15.55 pskfile.example
     4 -rw-r--r--  1 mosquitto root   355  6 mar 15.55 pwfile.example
     4 -rw-r--r--  1 mosquitto root   743 17 mar 20.16 secret
2

Can you publish the file /usr/lib/systemd/system/mosquitto.service ?

Édit “Could it be something permission-related?” It could but as it works manually I’m thinking about dependencies.

3

Please handle .pacnew files after updates. See here.

Also reboot your system and run the following command and paste its output ( without doing sudo systemctl start mosquitto.service).

mosquitto -v -c /etc/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf

4 
[Unit]
Description=Mosquitto MQTT Broker daemon
Requires=network.target

[Service]
User=mosquitto
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mosquitto -c /etc/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
Restart=on-failure

NoNewPrivileges=yes
ProtectSystem=full
ProtectHome=true
PrivateTmp=true
PrivateDevices=true

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Done, thanks. However, files were pretty much identical.
mosquitto -v -c /etc/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf gives:

1616771087: mosquitto version 2.0.8 starting
1616771087: Config loaded from /etc/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf.
1616771087: Opening ipv4 listen socket on port 1883.
1616771087: mosquitto version 2.0.8 running
1616771091: New connection from 192.168.1.85:54253 on port 1883.
...

It is working if started manually (with or without systemd), so maybe @Dulbi is right and dependencies might cause this issue.

5

Sorry to bump… Any other idea?

6

Solved with a quick and dirty hack:

sudo systemctl edit mosquitto.service

# Add following lines to override default restart behaviour:
[Service]
Restart=always
RestartSec=15
StartLimitInterval=150
StartLimitBurst=8

So basically, restarting the service for a longer time seems to fix my issue.
This is not the best way to work it out, but it works. I honestly don’t have any more time to properly fix this.
It looks like a dependency problem after all, as @Dulbi suggested.
Thanks for your time anyway.

7

Seems like I had an issue a while back with a service not starting when it involved network.target (which I never found). I changed to NetworkManager.service and the service started working.

Try changing in the .service file:

Requires=network.target
To:
After=NetworkManager.service

8

Doesn’t network manager require a GUI? I am running headless, no desktop environment is installed

9

Then After=what-ever-network.service you have.

10

This looked prmising, but unfortunately didn’t work.
This is my custom service file:

[Unit]
After=systemd-networkd.service

Still, mosquitto did not start automatically after a reboot.
I’ll stick with my improper solution.
Again, thanks

11

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