systemctl service systemd-notify not working with non-root user

Question

I have a simple example of a service unit and bash script on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 using Type=notify that I am trying to get working.

When the service unit is configured to start the script as root, things work as expected. When adding User=testuser it fails. While the script initially starts (as seen on process list) the systemctl service never receives the notify message indicating ready so it hangs and eventually times out.

[Unit]
Description=My Test
[Service]
Type=notify
User=testuser
ExecStart=/home/iatf/test.sh
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Test.sh (owned by testuser with execute permission)

#!/bin/bash

systemd-notify --status="Starting..."
sleep 5
systemd-notify --ready --status="Started"

while [ 1 ] ; do
  systemd-notify --status="Processing..."
  sleep 3
  systemd-notify --status="Waiting..."
  sleep 3
done

When run as root systemctl status test displays the correct status and status messages as sent from my test.sh bash script. When User=testuser the service hangs and then timesout and journalctl -xe reports:

Jul 15 13:37:25 tstcs03.ingdev systemd[1]: Cannot find unit for notify message of PID 7193.
Jul 15 13:37:28 tstcs03.ingdev systemd[1]: Cannot find unit for notify message of PID 7290.
Jul 15 13:37:31 tstcs03.ingdev systemd[1]: Cannot find unit for notify message of PID 7388.
Jul 15 13:37:34 tstcs03.ingdev systemd[1]: Cannot find unit for notify message of PID 7480.

I am not sure what those PIDs are as they do not appear on ps -ef list

Answer 1

This appears to be known limitation in the notify service type

From a pull request to the systemd man pages

    Due to current limitations of the Linux kernel and the systemd, this
    command requires CAP_SYS_ADMIN privileges to work
    reliably. I.e. it's useful only in shell scripts running as a root
    user.

I've attempted some hacky workarounds with sudo and friends but they won't work as systemd - generally failing with

No status data could be sent: $NOTIFY_SOCKET was not set

This refers to the socket that systemd-notify is trying to send data to - its defined in the service environment but I could not get it reliably exposed to a sudo environment

You could also try using a Python workaround described here

python -c "import systemd.daemon, time; systemd.daemon.notify('READY=1'); time.sleep(5)"

Its basically just a sleep which is not reliable and the whole point of using notify is reliable services.

In my case - I just refactored to use root as the user - with the actual service as a child under the main service with the desired user

Answer 2

sudo -u USERACCOUNT_LOGGED 通知发送“你好”