https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1191892 https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1191892#c10 --- Comment #10 from Franck Bui <fbui@suse.com> --- (In reply to Christian Boltz from comment #9)

Sorry, I'm not too keen to do such testing on a production system. However, I'd be very surprised if /etc/machine-id would temporarily exist during boot and then get deleted again before I can check it in a "normal" boot. (OTOH, it's surprising that the system boots without /etc/machine-id, see below.)

Indeed I don't think /etc/machine-id have temporarily existed neither. Nevertheless if the file was missing from the beginning, systemd should have warned you and emitted the error message you mentioned in your previous comment. I don't think the system fails to boot if machine-id is missing. However some tools such as journald or networkd might miss-behave.

One thing I checked is the content of the initrd - lsinitrd shows that it contains an empty machine-id file: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 21 10:22 etc/machine-id which is probably the result of generating the initrd while /etc/machine-id didn't (and doesn't) exist.

Indeed and in that case systemd temporarily generates a machine-id until the one defined in the rootfs takes over.

I know that all this doesn't explain why /etc/machine-id on the production server is missing (and why it still boots), and I'm afraid I can't do any tests on the production system that come with the risk of causing downtime.

An empty /etc/machine-id is probably missing from the Hetzner image, which is surprising since the installation of systemd is supposed to create one. I don't know how well this image is supported but if that's really the case, the problem probably lies in the generation of the image.

Is there a way to restore /etc/machine-id (ideally with the right value) that I can run on the production server?

There's the tool "systemd-machine-id-setup" which is used to init a brand new machine-id, see its man page. However it might be worth to look at the content of /var/log/journal since journald places its journal files in the directory named after the machine-id. Also note that if you create the file manually, it should have the 0444 perms. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the bug.