On Sunday 09 May 2021, L A Walsh wrote:
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I thought 'masked' simply meant that the service was under systemd's control.
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Under systemd masked is the the highest level of disablement, a masked unit cannot be started automatically or manually. So if I mask nmb, it won't be started at boot, it won't be started after boot even if some unit is started that "Wants" it, and I won't be able to manually start it with systemctl start nmb. I believe systemd may automagically mask some units - for example, if there is an error in a specification (but I'm getting out of my depth here). It may be that in the OP case, the units have been masked for a reason. In contrast to masked, disabled is one level lower. A disabled unit may be started automatically if something Wants it, and it can be started manually. For example I have disabled nmb, smb, and spamd, and I have a timer that goes off after boot that Wants nmb, smb and spamd. The deferal to after boot speeds up boot to sddm login by 6 seconds (I was curious as to how much I could speed up booting). Michael