Gitlab runner in docker: Cannot link to a non running container

I use gitlab runners in docker.

It uses our own php image and mysql:5.7 image. It worked before, but now we can see this error when CI job is started:

Running with gitlab-runner 10.4.0 (857480b6)
  on gitlab-runner-2 (00929f5e)
Using Docker executor with image registry.blahblah.work/infra/docker-base/php ...
Starting service mysql:5.7 ...
Pulling docker image mysql:5.7 ...
Using docker image mysql:5.7 ID=sha256:f008d8ff927dc527c5a57251b45cead7c9259c16a6a93c144f397eaafc103d36 for mysql service...
Waiting for services to be up and running...

*** WARNING: Service runner-00929f5e-project-4-concurrent-0-mysql-0 probably didn't start properly.

Error response from daemon: Cannot link to a non running container: /runner-00929f5e-project-4-concurrent-0-mysql-0 AS /runner-00929f5e-project-4-concurrent-0-mysql-0-wait-for-service/runner-00929f5e-project-4-concurrent-0-mysql-0

2018-02-13T08:49:03.752410664Z 
2018-02-13T08:49:03.752468595Z ERROR: mysqld failed while attempting to check config
2018-02-13T08:49:03.752476292Z command was: "mysqld --verbose --help"
2018-02-13T08:49:03.752481759Z 
2018-02-13T08:49:03.752486693Z mysqld: Can't read dir of '/etc/mysql/conf.d/' (Errcode: 13 - Permission denied)
2018-02-13T08:49:03.752491885Z mysqld: [ERROR] Fatal error in defaults handling. Program aborted!

Variables are set:

variables:
  MYSQL_DATABASE: test
  MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: password

What should I do to debug and fix this issue?

@DmitryRomanenko did you ever solve this? I’m having the same issue and trying to find a fix

@abdallah Yes, but it was about 1y ago and I forgot the solution.

May be it’s related to privileged mode in docker.