On 22/12/2024 20:35, Greg Wooledge wrote:
On Sun, Dec 22, 2024 at 01:16:31 -0500, Alex Wahl wrote:
Is there any point to worrying about what's masked and disabled if I don't have a
specific technical reason? The reason I asked it really just because I'm wondering if I
accidentally set a unit to that in the past I shouldn't have; I don't really know what a
"normal" system looks like
A service that's masked can NEVER be activated, by anything, unless
it's unmasked first.
Logs may still be full of complains that the service can not be started.
I consider masking services as a kind of kludge mostly suitable for
maintenance period.
A service that's disabled won't be started automatically, but it
could be activated by a different service. Or started manually.
Disabled is a normal state for enough units. A service may still be
activated through .socket, .timer, or a D-Bus call (if it has well known
bus name).
"systemctl status" for a specific unit reports actual state and the
upstream preset. Difference may be caused by package scripts. You may
setup a similar system in a VM and may compare configuration with your
host. Application may use feature detection code and may silently
disable some features if services are not running.
