for various reasons I won't go into, I have upstart running on a client's VPS. and whenever I apt-get upgrade, and libc6 gets upgraded, I have these problems:
initctl list, in user mode, gives the error initctl: Name "com.ubuntu.Upstart" does not exist.
initctl list, as root, gives the error initctl: Unable to connect to Upstart: Failed to connect to socket /com/ubuntu/upstart: Connection refused.
the problem is caused by the libc6 upgrade replacing libraries upon which upstart depends. the only fix I know of is reboot -f. but it's scary, because I don't even know how the necessary services, like exim4 and apache2, are being restarted, as I can't find anything in /etc/init that seem to have anything to do with these.
but, last time, according to my email exchanges with the client, it worked fine. it just happened again last night, so we'll see. for now I'm making some backups, just in case of disaster.
last updated 2017-07-06 16:02:30. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com