Influxdb won’t start after having run fine for a long time (bad gateway) leading to “influxdb.service: Failed at step EXEC spawning /usr/lib/influxdb/scripts/influxd-systemd-start.sh: Permission denied”

My influx database system has been running fine for a long time. Then suddenly my grafana was displaying nothing and it indicated bad gateway, and then ultimately to “influxdb.service: Failed at step EXEC spawning /usr/lib/influxdb/scripts/influxd-systemd-start.sh: Permission denied”.

The messages from systemd are cryptic and it is my opinion that they need a new maintainer. Redhat basically isn’t taking the right steps to simplify and to clarify their product. It is only getting more complex and harder for people to figure out the issues unique to using systemd.

Aside from that the issue boils down to the fact that after an update the /usr/lib/influxdb/scripts/influxd-systemd-start.sh was no longer marked as executable. The issue goes back to at least 2015. That’s 6 years. There’s a thread that talks about this issue and that’s where I got my solution. However, frankly the maintainer of influxdb should be operating as a distro cop to contact and correct the distributions to ensure that the distributions comply with how the product is supposed to be packaged and distributed.

The solution is to “sudo chmod +x /usr/lib/influxdb/scripts/influxd-systemd-start.sh“. Then you can manually restart the service or reboot the container/computer.