Autofs service failed because a configured resource limit was exceeded

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
  • Autofs

Issue

Autofs service fails with error

Job for autofs.service failed because a configured resource limit was exceeded. See "systemctl status autofs.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

Resolution

Kill the running autofs service and start the autofs service again.

#  ps -elf | grep autofs | grep -v grep  | awk '{print $4}' | xargs kill -9

Start the autofs service

# systemctl start autofs

Root Cause

  • Autofs binary was executed manually, because of which it failed to create a pid file. The process was already running therefore it was not possible to spawn another process.
  • Killing the previous process and restarting the service makes sure that the pid file is created and the service meets it's dependencies therefore starting the autofs service successfully.

Diagnostic Steps

  • Check if the autofs service is active
    # systemctl is-active autofs
  • If it is not active, check if the autofs binary has been executed, check as :-
    # ps -aux | grep -i autofs | grep -v grep

  • Check the options by with which the autofs binary was executed

  • If it does not have any options like --pid-file /run/autofs.pid , it was executed manually, and the service will fail.

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