systemd-journald can not create new system journal

[StefanWutz]

I see this error message using dmesg command running on bionic 1.10:

[10161.668320] systemd-journald[353]: Failed to create new system journal: No such file or directory

Creating manually the directory /var/log/journal and restarting the systemd-journald by

sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald.service

works as expected and new journal directories will be created.

I would expect that the journal directory will also be created when setting up the log directory structure[1].

[1] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh-agent/blob/master/platform/linux_platform.go#L972

[StefanWutz]

Closing ticket. The current behavior is fine.

Systemd-journald storage mode is set to "auto" which means if the directory /var/log/journal does not exist it behave as volatile storage and stores messages in temporary directory /run/log/journal.

The behavior will change in Ubuntu Focal as storage is by default set to persistent by consuming newer versions of systemd (244.1-2). Adding the directory /var/log/journal by the bosh-agent has to be revised.