aa-lsm-hook.service question

brent

Had a weird crash last night. Dmesg showed a plymouth.service and the aa-lsm-hook service stopped before crash.
I know the second one is part of apparmor.

After some research I fixed it. Just a simple systemctl restart aa-lsm-hook.service and it was fine.

I just checked status,

systemctl status aa-lsm-hook.service
Password: 
● aa-lsm-hook.service - Load AppArmor profiles
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/aa-lsm-hook.service; enabled; vendor p>
     Active: inactive (dead) since Thu 2021-03-11 08:33:24 XST; 4h 41min ago
    Process: 4424 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/aa-lsm-hook (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Main PID: 4424 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Mar 11 08:33:24 books systemd[1]: Starting Load AppArmor profiles...
Mar 11 08:33:24 books systemd[1]: aa-lsm-hook.service: Succeeded.
Mar 11 08:33:24 books systemd[1]: Finished Load AppArmor profiles.

This is my question:
can I interpret "dead since 8:30 this morning"--the time I restarted the service---as simply meaning it was restarted successfully at 8:30?
Trying not to overthink.
Thanks,

brent

did about 2 hours of research:
50% this is not good
5% what is running the PID?
45% blah blah, eyes glazing over, nothing to see here

I cant find 4424 with ps or any other tool. One command told me onestart service was the parent. And systemctl tells me a onestart service does not exist. Nautilus confirms this. I hate the conflicting info.
Schrödinger's cat: Do I have a service that is half-alive or half-dead?🙂

Harvey

Overthinking it. aa-lsm-hook is not persistent, it is a "oneshot" as in do your thing and then go away. It will always be inactive (dead) after a successful execution which happens on boot.

Example 3. Oneshot service

Sometimes, units should just execute an action without keeping active processes, such as a filesystem check or a cleanup action on boot. For this, Type=oneshot exists. Units of this type will wait until the process specified terminates and then fall back to being inactive

Source: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.service.html

brent

Harvey thank you. For some reason I got the impression its status had to be persistent. Impression was from red text in the dmesg to be honest---I never know how to quantify red text output sometimes.

edit: I don't know what caused the service to stop, but my question about interpretation was SOLVED, thank you