Why am I not able to run podman commands after the host is rebooted ?

Solution In Progress - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
  • podman

Issue

Unable to run podman commands every time the host is rebooted

$ podman ps
ERRO[0000] invalid internal status, try resetting the pause process with "podman system migrate": could not find any running process: no such process

Resolution

  • Error states that no active pause process that can be found for this user session and when it is not found, it can not inspect the details from boltdb database
  • To overcome this error, podman system migrate needs to be run as the rootless user. However, running this will only temporarily avoid the error and the error will re-occur when the host is rebooted.
  • How to overcome the error temporarily?
  • To overcome this permanently, the rootless user should have lingering enabled so that even if the user logs out, the user session is preserved
  $ loginctl enable-linger
  • To confirm if lingering is enabled for the user, run $ loginctl user-status | grep -m1 Linger and this should return Linger: yes
  • This makes the session remain active after logging off which enables the pause.pid to remain active even if the user is logged off or if the host is rebooted

P.S: Running $ podman system migrate can temporarily create a new pause process and the user will be able to run podman commands at that moment. But the error will reappear when the host is again rebooted. To overcome this, it is best suggested to enable lingering for this user

Root Cause

  • Lingering is not enabled for the user

Diagnostic Steps

  • You can check the status of linger for the user using the below command
$ loginctl user-status

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