Why does Puppet keep trying to start a running service?
The ideal way to check for a service is to use the hasstatus parameter, which calls the init script with the status parameter. This should report back to Puppet whether the service is running or stopped. In some broken scripts, however, the status output will be correct (“Ok” or “not running”), but the exit code of the script will be incorrect. Most commonly, the script will always blindly return 0, no matter what the actual service state is. Puppet only uses the exit code, so interprets this as “the service is stopped”. There are two workarounds, and one fix. If you must deal with the scripts broken behaviour as is, you can modify your resource to either use the pattern parameter to look for a particular process name, or the status parameter to use a custom script to check for the service status. The fix is to rewrite the init script to use the proper exit codes. When rewriting them, or submitting bug reports to vendors or upstream, be sure to reference the LSB Init Script Actions sta
