[lxc-users] a simple apt-get update fails with: Upstart: Failed to connect to socket

[Ivan Ogai]

First of all a big compliment to the LXC main developers, LXC rocks!

We have an unprivilaged container (created by a shell script) containing
a whole development environment. I.e. we use a LXC unprivilaged
container and a shell script as a convenient replacement for Vagrant for
us.

A developer just tried to upgrade a package in the container named
'grical', and it fails as shown below.

We wonder why and how to fix it.

    stefanos at bazooka:~/grical/provisionize$ lxc-attach -n grical
    root at grical:~/grical/provisionize# apt-get upgrade
    Reading package lists... Done
    Building dependency tree
    Reading state information... Done
    Calculating upgrade... Done
    The following packages will be upgraded:
    rabbitmq-server
    1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
    Need to get 5,042 kB of archives.
    After this operation, 881 kB of additional disk space will be used.
    Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
    Get:1 http://www.rabbitmq.com/debian/ testing/main rabbitmq-server all 3.6.1-1 [5,042 kB]
    Fetched 5,042 kB in 10s (497 kB/s)
    (Reading database ... 38702 files and directories currently installed.)
    Preparing to unpack .../rabbitmq-server_3.6.1-1_all.deb ...
    initctl: Unable to connect to Upstart: Failed to connect to socket /com/ubuntu/upstart-session/1000/2641: Connection refused
    * Stopping message broker rabbitmq-server                                                initctl: Unable to connect to Upstart: Failed to connect to socket /com/ubuntu/upstart-session/1000/2641: Connection refused
    invoke-rc.d: initscript rabbitmq-server, action "stop" failed.
    dpkg: warning: subprocess old pre-removal script returned error exit status 1
    dpkg: trying script from the new package instead ...
    initctl: Unable to connect to Upstart: Failed to connect to socket /com/ubuntu/upstart-session/1000/2641: Connection refused
    * Stopping message broker rabbitmq-server                                                 * message broker already stopped
                                                                                    [ OK ]
    dpkg: ... it looks like that went OK
    Unpacking rabbitmq-server (3.6.1-1) over (3.2.4-1) ...
    Processing triggers for ureadahead (0.100.0-16) ...
    Setting up rabbitmq-server (3.6.1-1) ...
    Installing new version of config file /etc/init.d/rabbitmq-server ...
    initctl: Unable to connect to Upstart: Failed to connect to socket /com/ubuntu/upstart-session/1000/2641: Connection refused
    * Starting message broker rabbitmq-server                                                initctl: Unable to connect to Upstart: Failed to connect to socket /com/ubuntu/upstart-session/1000/2641: Connection refused
    invoke-rc.d: initscript rabbitmq-server, action "start" failed.
    dpkg: error processing package rabbitmq-server (--configure):
    subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
    Processing triggers for ureadahead (0.100.0-16) ...
    Errors were encountered while processing:
    rabbitmq-server
    E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)