systemd user journals not being created

Question

Several identical machines all running Fedora 21 in a cluster are all exhibiting identical issues:

Attempting to pull a user journal with journalctl -r gives:

No journal files were opened due to insufficient permissions.

Trying journalctl --user -r gives:

No journal files were found.

Checking in /var/log/journal/[whatever] yields system journals (which seem to work fine as root) and one or two user journals. Logging in as a user that has a user journal in this directory shows that these users can pull their own journal just fine.

It seems like journals are being created for some users but not others. I can find nothing different about the users with journals, and it's not the same users exhibiting the problem on every system, despite identical /etc/passwd, /etc/group, and /etc/shadow files across the systems.

All of this worked fine on Fedora 20.

Solution

I believe this is related to this question.

I had this issue on Ubuntu 17.10. One of my users could view his journal entries, but another couldn't. The issue was resolved by changing the Storage directive of the [Journal] section of /etc/systemd/journald.conf to persistent:

Edit journald.conf

$ sudo vi /etc/systemd/journald.conf

Original Config

[Journal]
#Storage=auto
...

New Config

[Journal]
Storage=persistent
...

After a restart of journalctl, all users could view their respective logs:

$ sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald

Comments

[Dato]

In particular, the root cause for this is github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2744: “ Allow users to read their own volatile journals”. TL;DR: only in /var/log [persistent], not in /run [volatile], are journal files spilt by UID.