I am not quite sure why it worked.  I didnâ??t actually run the command, but my colleague did and was able to get the service to start after running

 

Kill -9 1289

 

Ps -ax did not show a process with that ID, and I also could not find a pid file in /var/run/BackupPC.  

 

Also, rebooted multiple times and always showed as running on PID 1289 when the service failed to start, saying BackupPC was already running, which it wasnâ??t.

 

Very odd!  This occurred on Fedora 25 with BackupPC installed via DNF.

 

 

 

 

 

Michael is correct that BackupPC does use $Info->{pid} (which is read from status.pl).  But it does check that that process exists before printing the error message (using perl's kill(0, pid) that doesn't really send a signal, but tells you whether the process is alive).  So I don't know why it claims process 1289 is running; that would mean "kill(0, 1289)" returns 1 (success)...

 

I assume after a reboot it is very possible that some other process is running and has used pid 1289, and isn't a short-lived process (ie, some other daemon or similar).

Does BPC check the name of the process that is found? This would help to avoid this confusion (pid exists but is not a BPC pid).

P.S.: Yes, it might ultimately turn out that you need to break down the door,
      but, in my experience, you usually don't break down a *random* door
      even then.

Which means the OP broke down a random door, and didn't even need to get into that room anyway (ie, killed a random unknown process, which may or may not be causing other problems, since the expected process is not running correctly).

Regards,
Adam