4 ms·

I always resisted running Ubuntu in production, even when it was much easier to install the necessary software. When you pick a distro, you're picking their pac

I always resisted running Ubuntu in production, even when it was much easier to install the necessary software. When you pick a distro, you're picking their packaging and maintainer culture. I've always prefered CentOS for that reason. Even the little things, like installing a new package won't start/enable the services (because you should have a chance to configure it first) always came off as more pragmatic for system administration.

jlgaddis 7y ago
I run Debian on my workstation and laptops but still prefer to use CentOS/RHEL on my servers. The automatic startup of newly installed services (before you even have the opportunity to configure them) on Debian (and derivatives) has always bothered me and is a (small) factor in my decision. Fortunately, there are a few "workarounds" to prevent newly installed services from being automatically started! First, there's the brute-force / heavy-handed approach -- override the systemd presets [0] to set all services to disabled by default: $ cat /etc/systemd/system-preset/00-disable-all-services.preset disable * Alternatively, as a one-time thing, you can "mask" the service before installing the package but this requires you to manually create the symlink (instead of using "systemctl mask") -- and requires you to know the name of the service unit beforehand: $ ln -s /dev/null /etc/systemd/system/nginx.service $ apt install nginx # ... configure nginx as desired ... $ systemctl enable nginx $ systemctl start nginx Finally, there's the old, "sloppy" (IMO) method of "hacking" the /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d script to immediately exit with a status code of 101 ("action forbidden") [1]. (I'd recommend avoiding the latter entirely and going with whichever of the first two options better suits your needs.) --- EDIT: Just remembered another method but I'm not sure if it still works: $ RUNLEVEL=1 apt install nginx --- [0]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.preset.html https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.pre... [1]: https://people.debian.org/~hmh/invokerc.d-policyrc.d-specification.txt https://people.debian.org/~hmh/invokerc.d-policyrc.d-specifi...

jlgaddis 7y ago

I run Debian on my workstation and laptops but still prefer to use CentOS/RHEL on my servers. The automatic startup of newly installed services (before you even have the opportunity to configure them) on Debian (and derivatives) has always bothered me and is a (small) factor in my decision. Fortunately, there are a few "workarounds" to prevent newly installed services from being automatically started! First, there's the brute-force / heavy-handed approach -- override the systemd presets [0] to set all services to disabled by default: $ cat /etc/systemd/system-preset/00-disable-all-services.preset disable * Alternatively, as a one-time thing, you can "mask" the service before installing the package but this requires you to manually create the symlink (instead of using "systemctl mask") -- and requires you to know the name of the service unit beforehand: $ ln -s /dev/null /etc/systemd/system/nginx.service $ apt install nginx # ... configure nginx as desired ... $ systemctl enable nginx $ systemctl start nginx Finally, there's the old, "sloppy" (IMO) method of "hacking" the /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d script to immediately exit with a status code of 101 ("action forbidden") [1]. (I'd recommend avoiding the latter entirely and going with whichever of the first two options better suits your needs.) --- EDIT: Just remembered another method but I'm not sure if it still works: $ RUNLEVEL=1 apt install nginx --- [0]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.preset.html https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.pre... [1]: https://people.debian.org/~hmh/invokerc.d-policyrc.d-specification.txt https://people.debian.org/~hmh/invokerc.d-policyrc.d-specifi...