DRBD-WAIT-PROMOTAB(7)

💖 DRBD-WAIT-PROMOTAB(7) — the DRBD Manual, but make it cute 💖

okay bestie, sit down, we're talking about drbd-wait-promotable@.service — yes that's a manual page number 7, yes it's a systemd unit, yes it's lowkey iconic. 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

drbd-wait-promotable@.service — literally just: wait for DRBD to become promotable. that's the whole job. that's the assignment. 💅

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

drbd-wait-promotable@RESNAME.service - Wait for DRBD to become promotable

where RESNAME is your resource name, obvi. 👑

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the tea, bestie. usually you do not want to "hardcode" an unconditional promotion attempt of DRBD resources, because you usually cannot know a-priori whether this instance of DRBD will have access to good data (yet). it's giving mystery. it's giving suspense. 🙈

and if you do try to promote (mount, use) DRBD before it can be certain to have access to good data, the attempt will fail in various ways — typically claiming wrong medium type, or need access to good data. not the vibe. not slay. 😭

this unit will wait for the DRBD internal state to indicate that it has access to good data. iconic behavior. but — and this is important, no cap — it does not monitor the state further, so this is good enough only to avoid trying to mount "too early" if you hard-code the mount attempt into your boot sequence, for example using an fstab entry or similar. it's a one-time vibe check, not a forever babysitter. 💀

if you want to actually monitor and react to DRBD state changes, use drbd-reactor or a cluster manager like pacemaker. those are the main characters for that job. ⭐

if you systemctl enable this unit, it will be required by drbd@.target, so anything depending on that target — for example an fstab entry — will implicitly wait until this DRBD indicated it was "healthy enough" to be used. the way it just handles that for you?? obsessed. 🫶

⚠️ it can still timeout, bestie. in which case systemd sees this as a start failure, and starting of any dependencies (e.g. the mount) won't be attempted at this point. so like… it doesn't limp along half-broken, it just stops. periodt. 💅

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🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

• drbd@.service(7)
• drbd@.target(7)
• drbd-lvchange@.service(7)

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

LINBIT HA Solutions GmbH https://linbit.com

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! brought to you by drbd-utils, dated 2026-08-15, filed under the DRBD Manual as DRBD-WAIT-PROMOTAB(7). go forth and let your resources become promotable in peace. 🌈✨💜