Docker service startup failed with status 203

General
1

I have a RHEL 7 server with Docker EE and I have installed Docker CE after removing Docker EE. But after installing Docker CE, when I try to start Docker service with command “systemctl enable --now docker”, it is failing with below error.

Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/docker.service to /usr/lib/systemd/system/docker.service
Job for docker.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status docker.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

When I see the status of Docker service (systemctl status docker.service ), I see below error.

Redirecting to /bin/systemctl status docker.service
  docker.service - Docker Application Container Engine
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/docker.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
  Drop-In: /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d
           httpd.conf, comp_config.conf
   Active: failed (Result: start-limit) since Sun 2024-03-24 11:00:00 CDT; 3s ago
     Docs: https://docs.docker.com
  Process: 24653 ExecStopPost=/var/lib/docker/scripts/dockerd-shutdown.sh (code=exited, status=203/EXEC)
  Process: 24651 ExecStartPre=/var/lib/docker/scripts/mount-overlay2fs.sh (code=exited, status=203/EXEC)

systemd[1]: docker.service failed.
systemd[1]: docker.service holdout time over, scheduling restart.
systemd[1]: Stopped Docker Application Container Engine.
systemd[1]: start request repeated too quickly for docker.service
systemd[1]: Failed to start Docker Application Container Engine. 
systemd[1]: Unit docker.service entered failed state.
systemd[1]: docker.service failed.
systemd[1]: start request repeated too quickly for docker.service
systemd[1]: Failed to start Docker Application Container Engine.
systemd[1]: docker.service failed.

How Docker EE removed?
I removed Docker EE by doing following steps.

  • Stopped Docker services
  • yum remove docker-ee and other docker packages.

Steps followed to install Docker - https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-docker-in-rhel-8

How can I fix this? Where I should start looking at?

2

systemctl status will not always show you everything. Try the other mentioned command as well, but what you are trying is not supported in any way. You have RHEL 7 and you follow a tutorial made for RHEL 8, but the tutorial uses the repository of Centos 7. RHEL packages are available only for s390x architectures.

Assuming it worked for other people, you still need the logs to find out why it doesn’t work for you. You can add the --debug flag to the docker daemon to get more detailed error messages from journalctl, but if you deleted Docker EE, but not the Docker data root and you want to use the original data root keping the old images and other data, that could also be the reason of the failing daemon if there was a change there.