services and systemd in F16

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Tue Aug 30 03:20:46 UTC 2011


On Sun, 2011-08-28 at 22:48 -0600, Peter G. wrote:
> In the system-config-services, I see that sshd is not running when I boot the 
> computer.

You can't rely on system-config-services any more, as it does not
understand systemd native services.

For a basic check, just do 'ps aux | grep sshd', that'll tell you if
there's actually an sshd process running.

'systemctl status sshd.service' will tell you about the service: it
should say 'active (running)'. 'failed' or 'active (exited)' would be
bad.

systemctl has various other capabilities which can give you useful
information on services, see 'man systemctl', or the systemd website, or
lennart's blog, or lennart's posts to devel at ...

> "The sshd service is managed by systemd. It may be started then run in the 
> background, or be activated on demand..."
> 
> I am unclear about the "be activated on demand" part. Does this mean that, when 
> I run a program like sftp or sshfs, that:
> 
> 1. systemd will automatically recognize that I need sshd.service to be started 
> and will therefore start it for me; or does it mean that
> 
> 2. I have to manually start sshd.service before I run sftp, sshfs, etc.

It means 1. But this is a generic message that's essentially just
s-c-services saying 'this is a systemd service and I don't know anything
about it'.  Not all systemd services are actually taking advantage of
systemd's socket activation feature yet - in fact, most of them aren't.
I think sshd is not using this feature, and it just runs on boot like it
did with sysv.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net



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