Strange problem during system reboot

Hello,

We are runnung into a problem during reboots of some of our systems.

OS:       RHEL 7.9
cfengine: cfengine-community-3.18.2-1.el7.x86_64

We have /var in a seperate logical volume, which contains the config for 
cfengine. cfengine writes backups of changed files to /service/cfbackup 
(which on larger systems /service is a seperate LVM-volume).

Now for the problem:
After rebooting a system quite a lot of config files maintained by 
cfengine ended up being empty (zero bytes), which obviously wreaks all 
kinds of havoc. This was eventually fixed by a second reboot and 
cfengine repairing the missing/empty config files (e.g. /etc/ntpd.conf). 
Among others, also the rsyslog.conf was damaged, making debugging a lot 
harder.

Findings so far:
When rebooting this system, no messages pertaining to stopping cfengine 
are found in either /var/log/messages in journalctl. Testing another 
system, we -do- see that cfengine is shut down after multiuser.target is 
stopped.
It looks like that cfengine is still running after filesystems are 
unmounted, since we found files written by cfengine not inside the 
mounted LVM-volume /service, but rather in the plain mount-directory 
inside the root filesystem. The question is: Why is cfengine still 
active while filesystems are being unmounted, and how did it manage to 
write zero-length files, when it should be maintaining the correct contents.
It somehow looks like a race condition, since we do not see this 
behavior on all our systems all the time, but in rare cases on large 
systems with heavy services that take a bit of time to stop.


Regards
Berthold Cogel

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