For about a week now, BOINC! wasn't launched any more on startup. It seems to be related to an option (new or changed?) of start-stop-daemon: --chdir. It appears that, by default, start-stop-daemon always change current directory to / but BOINC! needs to be launched in its "home" directory. So the "cd" command used above start-stop-daemon is useless. The solution is rather simple: just change this line: setsid start-stop-daemon --quiet --start --exec ${BOINCBIN} \ --chuid ${USER}:${GROUP} --nicelevel ${NICELEVEL} -- ${ARGS} > ${LOGFILE} 2>&1 & into that: setsid start-stop-daemon --quiet --start --exec ${BOINCBIN} --chdir ${RUNTIMEDIR} \ --chuid ${USER}:${GROUP} --nicelevel ${NICELEVEL} -- ${ARGS} > ${LOGFILE} 2>&1 & in the file /etc/init.d/boinc. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Just start the daemon: /etc/init.d/boinc start Actual Results: The daemon doesn't start and the log contains: "Another instance of BOINC is running." Actually, it tries to create files into / instead of its "home" directory and, of course, that fails since it runs as a normal user. Expected Results: The daemon "/usr/bin/boinc_client" sound have been launched. Portage 2.0.53_rc5 (default-linux/x86/2005.0, gcc-3.4.4, glibc-2.3.5-r2, 2.6.13-gentoo-r2 i686) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.13-gentoo-r2 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz Gentoo Base System version 1.12.0_pre9 dev-lang/python: 2.3.4-r1, 2.4.2 sys-apps/sandbox: 1.2.13 sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.59-r7 sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r1 sys-devel/binutils: 2.16.1 sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.20 virtual/os-headers: 2.6.11-r2 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86 ~x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CBUILD="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -mfpmath=sse -O2 -fweb -frename-registers -fomit-frame-pointer -fprefetch-loop-arrays -pipe" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3.4/env /usr/kde/3.4/share/config /usr/kde/3.4/shutdown /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/X11/xkb /usr/share/config /var/bind /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/splash /etc/terminfo /etc/texmf/web2c /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -mfpmath=sse -O2 -fweb -frename-registers -fomit-frame-pointer -fprefetch-loop-arrays -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoconfig distlocks sandbox sfperms strict" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mir.zyrianes.net/gentoo/ http://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo/ http://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/os/linux/gentoo http://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/gentoo/ http://distfiles.gentoo.org http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo" LANG="fr_FR.UTF-8" LINGUAS="fr" MAKEOPTS="-j2" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.europe.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="x86 X a52 aac acl acpi alsa apache2 apm berkdb bitmap-fonts bzip2 cdparanoia cdr cjk crypt cups curl dga dts dvd dvdr dvdread eds emacs emboss encode fam ffmpeg flac gcj gdbm gif gstreamer gtk gtk2 hal iconv idn imagemagick imlib ipv6 java jpeg jpeg2k kde kdeenablefinal libg++ libwww lm_sensors mad maildir matroska mbox mikmod mmap mmx mmxext mng motif mozilla mp3 mpeg ncurses nls nptl nvidia ogg oggvorbis openal opengl pam pcre pdflib perl pic png python qt quicktime readline samba sdl spell sse sse2 ssl svg tcpd tetex threads tiff truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts unicode v4l vcd vorbis win32codecs xine xml2 xmms xpm xprint xv xvid xvmc zlib video_cards_nvidia linguas_fr userland_GNU kernel_linux elibc_glibc" Unset: ASFLAGS, CTARGET, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS, PORTDIR_OVERLAY
I've experienced the same problem. Passing the "--dir" option to boinc_client is the way I solved it. I'll attach a trivial patch with my change, even though I'm not sure which solution is better in the long term. (Chroot is probably cleaner, but doesn't it end up moving the pidfile too?)
Created attachment 71123 [details, diff] trivial patch for passing --dir to boinc_client
I can confirm this bug. Another possible workaround is to add the following line to /etc/conf.d/boinc: ARGS="-dir ${RUNTIMEDIR}" But I agree that this bug should be fixed in the init script in portage, so the line above is a workaround and not a fix.
Thanks for reporting, it seems to be a change in behaviour as it did work just fine. I have committed boinc-4.72.20050813-r1 with numerous fixes including a fix for this issue. I think Benjamin Gaillard's solution was best and so used that. Thanks.
