While upgrading a debian zone to an unstable snapshot of 2010/06/01 I ran into the problem that it wouldn’t start anymore. When doing a vzlist, processes weren’t starting, count was kept at 1.

After debugging a bit I was able to narrow it down to the upgrade of the sysinit (and related) package from 2.87 to 2.88. After a bit of searching it seems to be related to a tcgetattr() call. A workaround seems to exist though, add the following to /etc/default/rcS

If you already have this problem, you can of course edit the file by changing it from the host system by editing the file directly. On debian open the file:

Where veid is the id of your OpenVZ zone.

The setting normally defaults to “makefile” which was introduced with the dependency based init scripts. Although it will increase startup time, it will at least allow the zone to start.