[Supervisor-users] CRIT Can't drop privilege as nonroot user

[Chris McDonough]

Adeel Ahmad Khan wrote:
> I setup supervisor a few months ago and it's been working properly
> since then, but recently we had to restart the server and after that I
> can't get it to start again.  I run supervisord, but "ps -aef | grep
> super" shows that nothing happens.  I'm seeing this in the logs:
> 
> 2009-12-25 11:37:20,096 CRIT Can't drop privilege as nonroot user
> 2009-12-25 11:37:20,188 INFO RPC interface 'supervisor' initialized
> 2009-12-25 11:37:20,188 WARN cElementTree not installed, using slower
> XML parser for XML-RPC
> 2009-12-25 11:37:20,192 INFO daemonizing the supervisord process
> 2009-12-25 11:37:20,192 INFO supervisord started with pid 4481
> 
> But I don't really understand what that means.

It means you're not starting the supervisord process as the root user.  This 
isn't really an "error", it's telling you that you specified a "user" in the 
[supervisord] section of the config file, but since you're running supervisor 
as a non-root user, the supervisord process can't "drop privileges" (become a 
different user).

Try:

supervisord -n -edebug

To start supervisor in the foreground and see messages from it.  This may help 
you figure out what is wrong.

- C