The rhts-compat service¶

On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and earlier releases, tasks are executed by a special service called rhts-compat. This service is last in the startup order and it intentionally “hangs” forever without fully starting up, so that tasks can be run attached to the console. As a consequence, when the rhts-compat service is running it is not possible to log in to the system’s console.

If you don’t need this compatibility mode for your tasks, you can disable it in the task metadata by adding:

RhtsOptions: -Compatible

Or you can disable it in your Beaker job definition by adding a task parameter:

<task ...>
  <params>
    <param name="RHTS_OPTION_COMPATIBLE" value=""/>
  </params>
</task>

The service can also be disabled system-wide by setting an environment variable in /etc/profile.d/task-overrides-rhts.sh, for example using a kickstart snippet:

<ks_append>
%post
cat >>/etc/profile.d/task-overrides-rhts.sh <<EOF
export RHTS_OPTION_COMPATIBLE=
export RHTS_OPTION_COMPAT_SERVICE=
EOF
%end
</ks_append>

On distros using systemd (which includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and all supported Fedora releases) the rhts-compat service cannot be used and is always unconditionally disabled.