Environment

• YugabyteDB Anywhere - All Versions where Manual Provisioning is Used

Issue

Running a task fails with an error on task [Reload daemon]

Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: Error occurred. Code: 1. Output: ybops.common.exceptions.YBOpsRuntimeError: Runtime error: Playbook run of yb-server-ctl.yml against XXXXXXXX, failed with return code 2
TASK [Reload daemon] ***********************************************************
Wednesday 04 July 2025  00:00:00 -0400 (0:00:00.000)       0:00:00.000 ******* 
fatal: [XXXXXXXX]: FAILED! => changed=false 
  module_stderr: ''
  module_stdout: ''
  msg: |-
    MODULE FAILURE
    See stdout/stderr for the exact error
  rc: 1

This could mean that systemctl --user daemon-reload failed, causing the Ansible Task to fail.

Resolution

Overview

This issue can occur if the the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR variable has not been set in the .bashrc, which should be set to /run/user/{USER_ID}, where USER_ID is the numerical userid from /etc/passwd.

XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is one of the variables setup when you install the pam utility for logging in with systemd.
This can cause systemctl --user daemon-reload to fail (which causes the Ansible runbook to fail when performing a task)

Steps (on each DB node)

1. Ensure that systemd-logind is enabled

systemctl status systemd-logind

Example output if this is enabled:

systemctl status systemd-logind
● systemd-logind.service - User Login Management
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-logind.service; static)
Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-logind.service.d
└─10-grub2-logind-service.conf
Active: active (running) since Tue 2025-05-13 15:09:44 UTC; 1 week 6 days ago
Docs: man:sd-login(3)
man:systemd-logind.service(8)
man:logind.conf(5)
man:org.freedesktop.login1(5)
Main PID: 1444 (systemd-logind)
Status: "Processing requests..."
Tasks: 1 (limit: 100413)
Memory: 2.9M
CPU: 3.485s
CGroup: /system.slice/systemd-logind.service
└─1444 /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-logind

2. Ensure that pam_systemd is enabled in /etc/pam.d/system-auth

-session optional pam_systemd.so

3. In your .bashrc for the yugabyte user, set the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR environment variable

export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u yugabyte)

Additional Information

See documentation on legacy provisioning: 

https://docs.yugabyte.com/stable/yugabyte-platform/prepare/server-nodes-software/software-on-prem-manual/#enable-yugabyte-user-processes-to-run-after-logout

For information on XDG variables, see: 

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/

For information on pam_systemd, see:

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/en/man8/pam_systemd.8.html