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I am running Linux Mint 19 Tara with a Cinnamon desktop. Since yesterday, the system malfunctions, and I have been struggling to understand what is wrong or how to debug the situation. I would appreciate any help that the community can give me.

The first symptom is that the login manager appears for only a few seconds, then the screen turns black for one or two minutes before it appears again, after which the cycle repeats.

I can login remotely to the system via ssh.

DNS is however not working; for any domain name like sikando.com, nslookup sikando.com returns ** server can't find sikando.com: SERVFAIL.

dmesg shows no errors.

tail /var/log/syslog repeatedly shows errors like this:

Sep 30 11:37:17 morla lightdm[4203]: Error getting user list from org.freedesktop.Accounts: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.TimedOut: Failed to activate service 'org.freedesktop.Accounts': timed out (service_start_timeout=25000ms)
Sep 30 11:37:17 morla dbus-daemon[1235]: [system] Activating systemd to hand-off: service name='org.freedesktop.Accounts' unit='accounts-daemon.service' requested by ':1.83' (uid=0 pid=4242 comm="lightdm --session-child 18 21 " label="unconfined")

systemctl status dnsmasq produces:

Failed to connect to bus: No such file or directory

The XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is not set.

My suspicion is that there is something wrong with either dbus or systemd, but I am not familiar with the internals of either, and I have no clue how to start diagnosing the problem.

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I had that too today. Apparently /var/run somehow had become a normal directory instead of a link to /run (as systemd requires, see this issue), no idea how that happened. Turning it back into a link seems to have solved the problem, my system boots normally again.

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  • Yes, replacing /var/run by a symbolic link to /run did the trick for me too. It is hard to believe that this happened by accident to both of us. Anyway, I am happy, thank a lot for sharing your fix. Commented Sep 30, 2020 at 15:17
  • You're welcome. Suspicious indeed, especially seeing the temporal proximity. Commented Sep 30, 2020 at 16:05
  • It probably happened due to a flawed update of base-files: package version 19.0.2 has a bug that causes this, and meanwhile has been retracted. I also got bitten by this. Details: forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=331605&p=1895447 Commented Sep 30, 2020 at 19:13
  • Yes a bug in an update explains everything. I got bitten again on my laptop, and I am glad I already knew the solution; had to boot in safe mode to fix it. Commented Oct 5, 2020 at 12:58

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