Default.target broken symlink

Hi all,

My fresh Almalinux server install has a broken symlink:

/etc/systemd/system/default.target

points to multi-user.target, which doesn’t exist, at least not in the same directory. Since the system boots anyway, I haven’t touched it, still wondering if this is perfectly normal or needs fixing.

Two options come to mind:

#1 There’s a multi-user.target living in /usr/lib/systemd/system/

#2 On my last server with CentOS installed, default.target was pointing to /usr/lib/systemd/system/graphical.target

Thanks!

What version of AlmaLinux are you using?

NAME=“AlmaLinux”
VERSION=“9.5 (Teal Serval)”
ID=“almalinux”
ID_LIKE=“rhel centos fedora”

It’s intact on the first two machines I checked here
Both started as minimal installs, one I added a gui, one I didn’t.

Operating System: AlmaLinux 9.5 (Teal Serval)
     CPE OS Name: cpe:/o:almalinux:almalinux:9::baseos
          Kernel: Linux 5.14.0-503.19.1.el9_5.x86_64
    Architecture: x86-64

No gui

lrwxrwxrwx.  1 root root   41 Nov 22 16:26 default.target -> /usr/lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target

With gui

lrwxrwxrwx.  1 root root   40 Jun  4  2024 default.target -> /usr/lib/systemd/system/graphical.target

Perhaps it has something to do with your install options or how you got to where you are?

Thanks for checking - that is very much appreciated. Sounds like it can’t hurt to have that link pointing to my existing /usr/lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target then.

You can (re)set the default:

systemctl set-default multi-user.target

as that should re-create the symlink.

Ok, interesting. On first try, it did nothing, but after I manually changed the link to some other, non-existing location, the link was replaced - this time with the correct path. Thanks for that!