Sudden outage: Start request repeated too quickly / Failed with result 'start-limit-hit'

[Graham Leggett <minfrin@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Out of the blue, we’ve had a sudden outage on a Rocky8 box where a service has suddenly decided it refuses to start, citing "Start request repeated too quickly / Failed with result 'start-limit-hit’”.

What makes no sense is that this service starts with no errors (it’s a simple bash script), then decides to cleanly stop for no clear reason.

There is nothing in the service file requesting a restart, can anyone confirm what feature this is and if it can be made to stop doing this?

beachfront ~ # systemctl status rspamd-autodiscovery.service
● rspamd-autodiscovery.service - Rspamd Configuration Autodiscovery
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/rspamd-autodiscovery.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: failed (Result: start-limit-hit) since Mon 2023-11-20 16:19:17 SAST; 4min 8s ago
  Process: 59025 ExecStart=/bin/bash /usr/sbin/device-rspamd-autodiscovery (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 59025 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Nov 20 16:19:16 beachfront.example.com systemd[1]: Starting Rspamd Configuration Autodiscovery...
Nov 20 16:19:16 beachfront.example.com systemd[1]: Started Rspamd Configuration Autodiscovery.
Nov 20 16:19:17 beachfront.example.com systemd[1]: rspamd-autodiscovery.service: Succeeded.
Nov 20 16:19:17 beachfront.example.com systemd[1]: Stopped Rspamd Configuration Autodiscovery.
Nov 20 16:19:17 beachfront.example.com systemd[1]: Stopping Rspamd Configuration Autodiscovery...
Nov 20 16:19:17 beachfront.example.com systemd[1]: rspamd-autodiscovery.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Nov 20 16:19:17 beachfront.example.com systemd[1]: rspamd-autodiscovery.service: Failed with result 'start-limit-hit'.
Nov 20 16:19:17 beachfront.example.com systemd[1]: Failed to start Rspamd Configuration Autodiscovery.

The service file looks like this:

beachfront ~ # cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/rspamd-autodiscovery.service
# systemd service for managing all postfix autoconfiguration.

[Unit]
Description=Rspamd Configuration Autodiscovery
Requires=rspamd.service
PartOf=rspamd.service
ReloadPropagatedFrom=rspamd.service
Before=rspamd.service
After=redis.service

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/bin/bash /usr/sbin/device-rspamd-autodiscovery
ExecReload=/bin/bash /usr/sbin/device-rspamd-autodiscovery
RemainAfterExit=on

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Regards,
Graham
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