The vnstat service has traditionally run as the root user. This was
fixed in Fedora 16 and higher to run as the vnstat user, but the same
fix was just introduced[1] into Fedora 15. There is a problem with this
fix in that it requires "systemd-tmpfiles" to be run to create the new
/run/vnstat directory required to store the pid file. This new directory
also required the /etc/vnstat.conf file to be changed as the PidFile
variable tells vnstat where to create the pid file. The end result is
that after a package update the service will fail to start unless they
manually create the /run/vnstat directory and update their config file.
Not a very nice requirement IMO.
1. Is it appropriate for the RPM to call systemd-tmpfiles or is there a
better way to create the new tmpfile directory?
2. The /etc/vnstat.conf variable change will break all upgrades, but
could something like sed be run in a postinstall script to update the
variable?
[1]
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/vnstat-1.11-3.fc15