Systemd service needs EnvironmentFile - but not found

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1

Hello,

I am having trouble connecting to my university’s VPN. I am using the Cisco anyconnect client. The client creates the following vpnagentd.service which fails on system startup:

[Unit] 
Description=Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client Agent 

[Service] 
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure
ExecStartPre=/opt/cisco/anyconnect/bin/load_tun.sh
ExecStart=/opt/cisco/anyconnect/bin/vpnagentd -execv_instance
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID 
PIDFile=/var/run/vpnagentd.pid
KillMode=process
EnvironmentFile=/etc/environment

[Install] 
WantedBy=multi-user.target

I found in the logs that the service does not find the file /etc/environment.

After a little research I came across a reddit post that says the file was removed after a December update. The question now is, where did the file go or how else can I pass the environment file to the service?

P.S.: before the December update the client was working. Therefore I suspect that the EnvironmentFile line is causing the problem.

2

@Tmax Hi and welcome to the forum :smile:
That would be around /usr merge, you need to use /usr/etc/environment.

3

Nowhere. This file is still used if it exists. You just cannot and never could assume that it exists, so this unit should have used EnvironmentFile=-/etc/environment to ignore missing file.

4

What exactly “use” means here? You should not use this file to define your own variables because this file will be unconditionally overwritten on update. And adding your settings to /etc/environment.d will not work with this unit anyway.

I do not know what environment variables are used here, but if it is just for setting a couple of anyconnect specific variables, using unit-sepecific file would be much better.

5

Thanks for your fast reply. Changing the line to EnvironmentFile=/usr/etc/environment fixed the problem! The client is working again!

I better not count the time I spent solving the problem. :slightly_smiling_face:

6

@Tmax see what @arvidjaar indicated, does it use it? If going to adjust a service file, then also better to copy into /etc/systemd/system so it won’t be overwritten on an update as well.

7

Me neither. The service file was created by the Cisco installer (third party closed source software). I didn’t touch this file or add anything to it. I only noticed that the service failed because of the missing /etc/environment file.

I don’t know if the service needs any variables at all, and if so, which ones. My /usr/etc/environment file is empty, so I assume that the service does not need any variables.

Since it is not an openSUSE service, it should not be overwritten during a system update. The Unit file is already in /etc/systemd/system.

Thanks for your help.