As of corosync upstream commit ae859515, in systemd builds, StateDirectory is set in the systemd corosync.service file. The corosync state directory defaults to this value if not set in the corosync config file. Corosync falls back to using /var/lib/corosync only if the systemd StateDirectory is not set.

The same commit removes /var/lib/corosync from RPM builds with systemd.

As a result, if corosync was built with systemd, then starting corosync outside of systemd fails unless /var/lib/corosync has been created manually or through some other means. Starting corosync directly from the command line fails with the following error, because the STATE_DIRECTORY environment variable was not set by systemd:

Cannot chdir to state directory /var/lib/corosync. No such file or directory

This causes Pacemaker's cts-fencing script to fail.

This seems like a bug in corosync, as it now assumes that corosync will always be started by systemd if available. However, we will work around it in cts by doing exactly that.