How to Fix “Failed to connect to bus: No such file or directory” Error When Executing “hostnamectl” on Debian

I bumped into this error when spinning up bitnami wordpress OVA VM in my EXSI hyppervisor when executing the command “hostnamectl”.

The root cause is that the dbus package is not installed.

To install the dbus package, use below command:

$ sudo apt-get install dbus

Then check two relevant services’ statuses using below:

$ sudo systemctl status dbus.service dbus.socket

Right after installation, both of them shall be “inactive”:

Then use next command to bring both up into active status:

$ sudo systemctl start dbus.service dbus.socket

And check their statuses again using

$ sudo systemctl status dbus.service dbus.socket

You shall see something like below:

Then the hostnamectl command can produce output successfully: