Very munch errors from Tracker-miner and Pulseaudio appear in journalctl on Ubuntu 20.04.
It seems to be caused by the user pihole linked to a home directory which doesn’t exist.
Cannot initialize database: Could not open sqlite3 database:'/home/pihole/.cache/tracker/meta.db': unable to open database file
tracker-store.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
tracker-store.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Failed to create secure directory (/home/pihole/.config/pulse): No such file or directory
Failed to start Sound Service.
In forums, it’s recommended to create a home directory (doesn’t work for me) or disable/remove tracker services.
Do you believe that it’s possible to add these same options into install script to prevent error in journalctl? adduser or useradd don’t seem to produce the same result. https://klop.solutions/linux-love-it-hate-it/
For those with this problem, it’s possible to change user’s home directory to /nonexistent? usermod -d /nonexistent pihole
You’re right. However I think it’s a special argument that seems more appropriate.
Home directory. If this field is left empty, it will be automatically created by appending the username to the home partition. The /nonexistent home directory is considered special and is understood to mean that no home directory is to be created for the user.
user 'lp': directory '/var/spool/lpd' does not exist
user 'news': directory '/var/spool/news' does not exist
user 'uucp': directory '/var/spool/uucp' does not exist
user 'list': directory '/var/list' does not exist
user 'irc': directory '/var/run/ircd' does not exist
user 'gnats': directory '/var/lib/gnats' does not exist
user 'nobody': directory '/nonexistent' does not exist
pwck: no changes
As far as I can tell, /nonexistent or /var/spool/lpd are just string values.
That would suggest that the former only may gain special meaning by virtue of the software processing that value, i.e. by convention.
And indeed, it would seem that different flavours of Linux behave differently when it comes to non-existing home directories of system users, see e.g.
Pi-hole would have to consider at least the impact on behaviour for its supported OSs. I'll hand this forward to development, and they will decide how to proceed.
