Re: documenting on how not starting a daemon upon installation

[Ansgar <ansgar@43-1.org>]

Marvin Renich writes:
> * Marco d'Itri <md@Linux.IT> [200310 11:23]:
>> The modern and simple solution is "systemctl mask", as long as you do 
>> not need to care about the 0.6% of systems which do not use systemd.
>> If you are doing this for your own systems then you obviously know if 
>> you can rely on systemd or not.
>
> I don't believe this is correct, though I could be wrong.  I believe
> policy-rc.d is sufficient for both systemd and sysvinit systems, and
> that it is necessary for _packages_ that only ship an init script and
> not a service file, regardless of the init system in use.
>
> Can you tell me,
>
> A)  Does systemctl mask work for packages that do not have a systemd
> service file when systemd is the init system?

It should work: init.d scripts just get a .service file generated that
calls `ExecStart=/etc/init.d/${something} start` (and some somewhat
appropriate settings).  You can find the generated units in
/run/systemd/generator*; see also man:systemd-sysv-generator(8).

You can also change other settings for init-based services by creating a
`/etc/systemd/system/${something}.service.d/local.conf` just like for
native systemd services.

> B)  Can systemctl mask be run on a subdirectory that you are about to
> chroot into, but have not yet done so?

I would expect something like `systemctl --root=/chroot mask
${something}.service` to work.  If it doesn't work, that's probably a
bug.

Ansgar