I recently moved my tmp and var directories from under / to a shared partition of their own. All went well at first sight, but now I'm having this error message while booting:

<notice>boot.klog start
Creating /var/log/boot.msg
Can't open or create /var/run/klogd.pid.
failed
<notice>killproc: kill(738,29)
<notice>'boot.klog start' exits with status 0

It's taking longer for the system to boot into Gnome or KDE, by the way (it really flew before, now it's taking about thirty seconds).

I checked /var/run and noticed that there effectively wasn't any such file. I manually created one, just to see what would happen, but it had disappeared again the next time I booted.

Then I tried setting /var/run to 770 in single-user mode. After another reboot, I got the same error message even though this time the file was duly created by the system. Also, the permissions on /var/log were back at 644.

Right now, the system is once more failing to put klogd.pid in /var/run.

Am I right to assume that this is essentially a matter of correct permissions? If so, how could I make them stick? And if not, would there be any other solution?

I don't know if I can help you, but for me -- or anybody else -- to help you, you might want to to post some more info ...

For starters, what distro are you using? You said you moved /var and /tmp to a shared partition of their own. By this, do you mean you created these directories on another partition and created symlinks to them? Do you mean something else?

Is this "shared partition" automatically mounted (as directed by /etc/fstab), and is it getting mounted rw?

Hello,

Thanks for your reply. This is just a quick note to let you know that the issue seems to be solved.

Yes, I put /tmp and /var on a single shared partition exactly as you described. The procedure appears to work very well for Gentoo (which is where I got my information) but this was on Suse. I moved my home and tmp partitions without a problem but var was something else.

Anyway, I tried quite a few tricks, including reinstalling sysklogd and klogd, until I saw a pattern to it: it seemed as if something was actually protecting /var/run from being written to. I didn't find anything useful on the net but a few blogs vaguely mentioned AppArmor. All I had to do, it turns out, was run AppArmor and change permissions for klogd.pid.