Feedback needed: How to disable services at startup... and keep them so.

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

Hello,

A month ago, I disabled Network Manager service in my Squeeze system so 
it doesn't run on start up. I wanted to keep NM installed (just in case) 
but preferred to use the old "ifup" network setup method.

So I issued "update-rc.d network-manager remove" and also disabled gnome 
NM applet from being started. So far so good, no more NM running at 
booting.

A couple of days ago I lost network connectivity in that system (no 
Internet/local access because "eth0" was not getting an IP from dhcp 
server, as used to). I had to restart the whole system in order to 
restore network connectivity (neither restarting networking service nor 
"ifup/down eth0" had any positive effect).

After a bit of digging, I realized that Network Manager service was 
running (!) again. I did not enable, so something happened which caused 
the service to be "reengaged" again.

Looking into "/var/log/apt/term.log" I saw the following (sorry, the log 
is recorded in Spanish, hope is still clear):

***
Log started: 2010-12-01  23:44:34
(...)
Preparando para reemplazar network-manager 0.8.1-3 (usando .../network-
manager_0.8.1-4_i386.deb) ...
Desempaquetando el reemplazo de network-manager ...
Preparando para reemplazar network-manager-gnome 0.8.1-1 (usando .../
network-manager-gnome_0.8.1-2_i386.deb) ...
Desempaquetando el reemplazo de network-manager-gnome ...
(...)
Configurando network-manager (0.8.1-4) ...
Reloading system message bus config...done.
Stopping network connection manager: NetworkManager already stopped.
Disabling interfaces configured with plain DHCP in /etc/network/
interfaces so that NetworkManager can take them over
Auto interfaces found: lo eth0
iface to disable = eth0
Disabling interface: eth0 ... done.
Starting network connection manager: NetworkManager.
Configurando network-manager-gnome (0.8.1-2) ...
***

Basically, the log says on December 1st there was an update for NM and a 
new package got installed (0.8.1-4). After that, even though NM service 
was expressly disabled, the update seems to re-enabled it again.

Before I fill a bug report (I think a service that has been manually 
disabled should keep its state regardless any further update it can be 
applied afterwards), I would like to get some feedback... what do you 
think on this matter? I missed something -there is a better way to handle 
this or should I write a report?

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón