NetworkManager, dbus, systemd wackyness

[Tom Horsley]

Every single time I start firefox, or claws-mail, or for all
I know anything else that does any kind of network activity,
I get messages like this in /var/log/messages:

Nov 17 19:40:48 zooty dbus[964]: [system] Activation via systemd failed for unit 'dbus-org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.service': Unit dbus-org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.service failed to load: No such file or directory. See system logs and 'systemctl status dbus-org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.service' for details.
Nov 17 19:40:48 zooty dbus-daemon[964]: dbus[964]: [system] Activation via systemd failed for unit 'dbus-org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.service': Unit dbus-org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.service failed to load: No such file or directory. See system logs and 'systemctl status dbus-org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.service' for details.

I have NetworkManager disabled. I have even tried removing
the files in /etc/dbus-1/system.d/ that define the NetworkManager
service, and that is probably what produces the above errors
instead of the previous slightly different ones I was getting.

Does anyone have a clue what in the blue blazes systemd is
doing to make it try so hard to start NetworkManager on any
network activity? And better yet, a clue how to make it stop :-).

Maybe my logs would be cleaner if I just changed the
NetworkManager dbus service definition to run /bin/true
so it would think it started it?

Currently 99.9% of my /var/log/messages file consists of
either the above messages or other ones that say:

Nov 17 19:44:01 zooty systemd-logind[953]: New session 434 of user tom.
Nov 17 19:44:02 zooty systemd-logind[953]: Removed session 434.

which apparently happen at least every 5 minutes when my cron
job runs fetchmail.