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On an Ubuntu 20.04 installation, how can I find out, why some services got masked? There's only answers about specific services, but I can't find any info about how to troubleshoot that behavior.

For now I got these services masked:

alsa-utils.service masked enabled apache-htcacheclean.service masked enabled apache2.service masked enabled brltty.service masked enabled cryptdisks-early.service masked enabled cryptdisks.service masked enabled hwclock.service masked enabled mysql.service masked enabled pulseaudio-enable-autospawn.service masked enabled rc.service masked enabled rcS.service masked enabled saned.service masked enabled sudo.service masked enabled x11-common.service masked enabled phpsessionclean.timer masked enabled

sudo works fine btw.

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In many cases, these services are masked because they correspond to initscripts which are not supposed to be used with systemd, because their systemd equivalent has a different name or is handled differently.

For example, alsa-utils is masked because with systemd, /etc/init.d/alsa-utils shouldn’t be used; instead, the alsa-restore service restores the sound card settings with systemd. Likewise, saned is masked because with systemd, the SANE daemon is handled by saned.socket and [email protected].

To determine whether a masked service is a “system property”, i.e. made that way by the distribution, or a local change, check whether they are masked in /lib/systemd/system:

$ ls -l /lib/systemd/system/alsa-utils.service /lib/systemd/system/saned.service lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Dec 7 2020 /lib/systemd/system/alsa-utils.service -> /dev/null lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Jul 25 2021 /lib/systemd/system/saned.service -> /dev/null

Masked units are linked to /dev/null; the above shows that the distribution’s maintainers set the units up in this way. If such links don’t show up in /lib/systemd/system, they’ll be in /etc/systemctl/system, and that indicates that the local system administrator masked them.

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