Arch Linux

Koko210

Member

Registered: 2024-08-12

Posts: 7

All services disabled, custom service gone?

After a reboot (and an update) I was very confused to find basically all systemd services I had enabled like docker, sshd, even NetworkManager, etc. to have been disabled for some reason. Additionally, a custom .service file I had written in my /etc/systemd/system directory is now nowhere to be seen.

I enabled them, or at least the ones I could think of, again and even rebooted once more. It didn't seem to have happened again, although only docker did fail to start for some reason I will investigate further. The rest seems fine.

I looked around and didn't really find anyone having experienced something like this. I am extremely confused. There doesn't seem to be an issue at hand currently after I reenabled everything, but does anyone have an explanation what happened?

I'm not even sure what logs to provide and what details to give, so please do let me know if and what additional info I can post. Nothing in journalctl strikes me as odd. I must point out that I am not sure if an update of some sorts caused this as the PC is basically a headless server, so it often is up for days before rebooting, so I can't be sure which update to suspect.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,174

Re: All services disabled, custom service gone?

Inexplicable things like these often have a very explicable cause... the user. Check your shell history or potential scripts you've ran whether you maybe fumbled up checking some variable that would thus lead to an rm of the symlinks under /etc/systemd

Last edited by V1del (2024-10-25 15:52:35)

Koko210

Member

Registered: 2024-08-12

Posts: 7

Re: All services disabled, custom service gone?

Inexplicable things like these often have a very explicable cause... the user. Check your shell history or potential scripts you've ran whether you maybe fumbled up checking some variable that would thus lead to an rm of the symlinks under /etc/systemd

Thanks for the suggestion. In my shell history the only thing that I've done remotely recently to do with systemd is restarting and enabling the systemd-journal service since I remember there was some issue where it didn't run on boot. Would that have anything to do with this in your opinion? I haven't run any user script from what I can see, so for now I can only assume some package update over the last few weeks did this.

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 12,079

Re: All services disabled, custom service gone?

He didn't say you did anything with systemd, he said you probably screwed up an rm. Package updates won't do this.

Edit: maybe you don't realize, enabling a service just creates a symlink in /etc/systemd/.

Last edited by Scimmia (2024-10-26 13:57:04)

Koko210

Member

Registered: 2024-08-12

Posts: 7

Re: All services disabled, custom service gone?

He didn't say you did anything with systemd, he said you probably screwed up an rm. Package updates won't do this.

Edit: maybe you don't realize, enabling a service just creates a symlink in /etc/systemd/.

I do know what enabling a service does, no need to worry about that.

And I do apologize for not being specific enough with my wording, I meant that I didn't see anything suspicious regarding systemd or anything targeting /etc/systemd, including any rm.

I suppose the most important thing to take away is that a package update can't cause this. I mostly wanted to ask if there was any known cause for something like this that I wasn't aware of, but it seems there isn't. I will assume I did do something silly without realizing it and can't trace it back.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,174

Re: All services disabled, custom service gone?

Well technically a package update could cause this, but it would be quite a weird package, most likely from the AUR and probably not generally widely used.

In general it's somewhat hard to reason about an unreproducible issue that left no evidence.

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 12,079

Re: All services disabled, custom service gone?

Did you maybe replace the /etc/systemd dir with a symlink, or something similar? Then a package update could do it.