Freeradius 3.0.21 with chroot enables fails to start from the Systemd unit file.

[Alan DeKok]

On Apr 18, 2022, at 6:53 AM, Antonios Kalkakos <akalkakos at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I am trying to test chroot on a Raspberry Pi running the distro-provided Freeradius 3.0.21 on the 32bit Raspberry Pi OS (Debian) 11.

  Chroot should work by itself.  I doubt that it will work with systemd, though.

...
> Apr 16 14:14:37 raspberry systemd[1]: freeradius.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE

  Hmm... "FAILURE".   Maybe there's an additional error message buried somewhere inside of the systemd logs?

> Although I am not a Systemd or a Freeradius guru, I made a simple investigation with the following results:

  That's all a very good approach.

> b) As 'freerad' *with chroot enabled*, freeradius -f -lstdout returns immediately without reporting or logging any error(s):
> 
> ----------freeradius -f -lstdout output---------------------
> freerad at raspberry:$ freeradius -f -lstdout
> Sat Apr 16 14:24:50 2022 : Info: Starting - reading configuration files ...
> freerad at raspberry:$
> ----------End of freeradius -f -lstdout output--------------

  If you do "echo $?" immediately after that, you'll see if the server exited with an error.

  I'd say try 3.0.25, maybe it produces better error messages.

> Is this a permission problem or am I doing something wrong?

  chroot should work, but I can't recall trying it in the last few years.

  I doubt very much that chroot will work with systemd.  Systemd is just too weird, and has many additional requirements over a normal chroot process.

  Alan DeKok.