I have a CentOS 7 system where I needed to restart chronyd - but the systemctl restart failed with the error: systemd[1]: Starting NTP client/server... systemd[43578]: Failed at step NAMESPACE spawning /usr/sbin/chronyd: Stale file handle systemd[1]: chronyd.service: control process exited, code=exited status=226 Turns out there are a couple of Stale NFS file handles from fuse mounts (related to gvfsd) of sub directories under an NFS mounted home directory server - but the home directory for the user in this case, no longer exist (user has left) However, I have no idea why these 'Stale file handles' prevent a service being started by systemd ? In this case, chronyd has nothing to do with NFS mounted user home directories - so shouldn't really care ? I have tried everything I can think of to clear these stale mounts, but with no luck Does anyone know why systemd complains about unconnected 'Stale file handles' - and is there any way I can tell systemctl to start a service regardless of these 'errors' ? Rebooting the host will be a last resort (the system is used by many users) - but in the meantime, I've manually started the /usr/sbin/chronyd binary directly, which runs fine Thanks James Pearson