Comment 26 for bug 1847794

Ok, we found the issue. The problem happens when the maas deb packages are purged and then reinstalled. That might leave maas lock files in /run/lock/ that are now owned by a numeric user.

If maas is reinstalled directly, then things should work since maas should get the same uid as before and things will work.

But if you install some other deb package that adds a user, and then reinstall maas, the maas uid will now be different than before, and it won't have permissions to remove the stale lock files.

So I would say that the original bug that this was about was actually fixed already.

This is a separate bug that probably started to show up when you changed your systems in some way (i.e. installing an extra package), having the same symptoms as the original bug.

That explains why you started to see it recently only, after not seeing it for a long while.