FAHclient won't start, Debian on Dell Studio

[wjr1995]

Hi all,

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 sudo /etc/init.d/FAHClient start

Starting fahclient ... FAIL

Installed successfully, but won't start and FAHControl obviously can't connect since the client won't start. There are no error codes to chase here, the verbosity is atrocious. What do I do, in simple steps?

[Joe_H]

Depending on your version of Debian, you may need to install some dependencies, or make some other changes. The current client was released 2 years ago, some of the default packages installed have changed.

[Revenant]

I installed within the past few days on Debian Buster and managed to get folding fairly painlessly. Can probably try to help out.

wjr1995, it would be helpful if you specified what version of Debian you’re running, since a lot of things can very between versions.

For starters, since you're probably using systemd, try running the following command and see what it says:

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sudo systemctl status FAHClient

[wjr1995]

That command gives

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● FAHClient.service - LSB: Folding@home Client
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/FAHClient; generated)
   Active: inactive (dead)
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)

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lsb_release -a

gives Debian 10, Buster.

To make sure I was able to get all necessary dependencies this is my sources.list:

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deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ buster main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ buster/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ buster-updates main contrib non-free

# Uncomment lines below then 'apt-get update' to enable 'apt-get source'
#deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ buster main contrib non-free
#deb-src http://security.debian.org/ buster/updates main contrib non-free
#deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ buster-updates main contrib non-free
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster main contrib non-free

# This system was installed using small removable media
# (e.g. netinst, live or single CD). The matching "deb cdrom"
# entries were disabled at the end of the installation process.
# For information about how to configure apt package sources,
# see the sources.list(5) manual.

[Revenant]

OK. I am also running Debian Buster, so in theory this should be pretty doable. Let’s see how we go, shall we?

Let’s start with the basics. I’m not sure which installation method you used, but as far as I can tell the basic installation method for FAH on Linux is, “here are the debs, you figure it out.” If you were able to just download, click, and install using a graphical installer, hopefully dependency issues are not something we have to worry about.

The advanced installation FAQ, on the other hand, recommends using dpkg with --force-depends. I'm not sure why it does this, since this is a recipe for broken dependencies!

If you installed using this method, there are a couple of ways to fix any problems this might have caused. The first one is:

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 apt-get --fix-broken install

I personally installed with gdebi, which will resolve dependencies for you on install. (I’d definitely recommend using it in future when installing debs.)

e.g.

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sudo apt-get install gdebi
sudo gdebi fahclient_7.5.1_amd64.deb

When I first installed FAH on this machine, I noticed I wasn’t able to connect to the client or start the service. This was because the installer had somehow started a rogue copy of FAHClient, and the solution was to kill it and start the service myself, like so:

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ps aux | grep FAHClient
sudo pkill FAHClient
sudo systemctl start FAHClient

The first step is how I found the rogue running copy, so that might be worth doing just to check if this is a problem for you as well.

[wjr1995]

Hi Revenant, thanks for taking me under your wing. Just like you I used GDebi after I added the right repos to my sources.list. Right now the package manager is happy.

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ps aux | grep FAHClient

gives

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pi       18205  0.0  0.0   7848   616 pts/2    S+   11:11   0:00 grep --color=auto FAHClient 

. pkill ran fine, then the last command gave

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Job for FAHClient.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status FAHClient.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

[ipkh]

I don't think you can start fahclient as a service on buster.
You should still be able to start fahclient manually by navigating to /usr/bin in a terminal and run FAHClient.

[wjr1995]

Upon following that instruction, terminal gives

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/usr/bin/FAHClient: error while loading shared libraries: libbz2.so.1.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

[kostuek]

Try

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sudo apt-get install libbz2-1.0

first.

[wjr1995]

libbz2-1.0 is already the newest version (1.0.6-9.2~deb10u1).

[mat2]

This is weird. The library should be in the correct location, see: https://packages.debian.org/buster/amd6 ... 0/filelist

Please attach output of

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dpkg -L libbz2-1.0:amd64

and

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grep -r . /etc/ld.so.conf.d/

Are you using the amd64 architecture?

It is possible to specify the library path manually, like

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export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/

(see `man ld.so` ) but this should not be needed.

I'm still on Ubuntu 16.04, in my case

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mateusz@mateusz-ubuntu:~$ dpkg -L libbz2-1.0:amd64
/.
/lib
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libbz2.so.1.0.4
/usr
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/libbz2-1.0
/usr/share/doc/libbz2-1.0/copyright
/usr/share/doc/libbz2-1.0/changelog.Debian.gz
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libbz2.so.1
/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libbz2.so.1.0
mateusz@mateusz-ubuntu:~$ 

[wjr1995]

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 dpkg -L libbz2-1.0:amd64
dpkg-query: package 'libbz2-1.0:amd64' is not installed
Use dpkg --contents (= dpkg-deb --contents) to list archive files contents.

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 grep -r . /etc/ld.so.conf.d/
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/libc.conf:# libc default configuration
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/libc.conf:/usr/local/lib
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/x86_64-linux-gnu.conf:# Multiarch support
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/x86_64-linux-gnu.conf:/usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/x86_64-linux-gnu.conf:/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/x86_64-linux-gnu.conf:/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/i386-linux-gnu.conf:# Multiarch support
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/i386-linux-gnu.conf:/usr/local/lib/i386-linux-gnu
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/i386-linux-gnu.conf:/lib/i386-linux-gnu
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/i386-linux-gnu.conf:/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/i386-linux-gnu.conf:/usr/local/lib/i686-linux-gnu
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/i386-linux-gnu.conf:/lib/i686-linux-gnu
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/i386-linux-gnu.conf:/usr/lib/i686-linux-gnu
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/fakeroot-i386-linux-gnu.conf:/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libfakerot

I'm running 64 bit but some packages may be i386 for compatibility/availability. Lemme know if you want me to check a specific one as well as how to do so. Also what did my output tell us from those two commands?
Since it wasn't installed, I took the liberty of installing libbz2-1.0:amd64 but I don't know what to do next