I’ve been having an issue with the Apps service in TrueNAS ElectricEel-24.10.2, where upon reboot the app service fails to start; it will report a failure on the “Apps” tab of the dashboard, with an error “Docker service could not be started”. However this seems to just be a UI issue as all of the docker applications have actually been started successfully. This can be verified by going into the shell and running docker ps, which shows al of the services as being up—and of course the obvious way, which is to access the services and see that they’re running just fine.

Once in this state though, the apps cannot be managed, and I cannot find a way to forcibly restart the service in such a way that the UI picks it up. The only method to resolve this (that I’ve found) is to reboot and hope that this time it’ll work.

This seemed to start happening as I put more services onto the system: I wonder if the issue is that it’s waiting for all services to start, and that happens too slowly for it, so it times out. I’ve found that it’s somewhat more reliable if I reduce the load on the system at startup by having a few Virtual Machines that I run not boot at startup, and just booting them manually. This appears to make things work more reliably, which is what led me to believe it’s about the time taken for things to start.

Note that this is me re-opening as the issue still occurs; that one got closed because I failed to respond quickly enough; sorry about that. I’ve got debug logs this time during the time the error is actually occurring; previously I’d avoided rebooting in order to not have the problem reoccur, because when it does the only solution I’ve found is to attempt to reboot several times in a row until the problem doesn’t occur, which is quite miserable.