How stop rpcbind from being started on Arch Linux?

Question

My Arch Linux's systemd starts rpcbind automatically. What do I have to do to stop systemd to do this? There are no remote filesystems in /etc/fstab. The only thing I found why rpcbind gets started is that is supposedly wanted by multi-user target but there is no service in the directory. How can I figure out why it is really started?

Answer 1

There is an open bug report on the Arch tracker.

Your best be would be to mask the service:

systemctl mask rpcbind.service

See Lennart Poettering's series of blog posts, systemd for Administrators, Part V for details on masking:

3. You can mask a service. This is like disabling a service, but on steroids. It not only makes sure that service is not started automatically anymore, but even ensures that a service cannot even be started manually anymore. This is a bit of a hidden feature in systemd, since it is not commonly useful and might be confusing the user. But here's how you do it:

$ ln -s /dev/null /etc/systemd/system/ntpd.service
$ systemctl daemon-reload

By symlinking a service file to /dev/null you tell systemd to never start the service in question and completely block its execution. Unit files stored in /etc/systemd/system override those from /lib/systemd/system that carry the same name. The former directory is administrator territory, the latter terroritory of your package manager. By installing your symlink in /etc/systemd/system/ntpd.service you hence make sure that systemd will never read the upstream shipped service file /lib/systemd/system/ntpd.service.

systemd will recognize units symlinked to /dev/null and show them as masked. If you try to start such a service manually (via systemctl start for example) this will fail with an error.

Answer 2

If there's no wanted/rpcbind.service present it's most likely not being started directly but being started via socket activation. You can tell if that's how it was most recently started by looking for indirect instead of static in the Loaded line of the status output (note that systemctl automatically added the .service to the unit name as it wasn't included on the command line):

$ systemctl status rpcbind
● rpcbind.service - RPC bind service
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/rpcbind.service; indirect; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Fri 2017-03-31 15:39:29 WIB; 37min ago
 Main PID: 6763 (rpcbind)
   CGroup: /system.slice/rpcbind.service
           └─6763 /sbin/rpcbind -w

Regardless, you can check to see if you have socket activation enabled:

$ systemctl status rpcbind.socket
● rpcbind.socket - RPCbind Server Activation Socket
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/rpcbind.socket; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (listening) since Fri 2017-03-31 15:39:29 WIB; 37min ago
   Listen: /var/run/rpcbind.sock (Stream)
           [::]:111 (Stream)
           0.0.0.0:111 (Stream)

(In the example above I'd disabled the unit but not yet stopped the existing listener that starts rpcbind when it receives a request.)

Executing the following should kill both and make sure they never start:

$ systemctl disable rpcbind.service rpcbind.socket
$ systemctl stop rpcbind.service rpcbind.socket

A status check should then produce something along the lines of:

$ systemctl status rpcbind.service rpcbind.socket
● rpcbind.service - RPC bind service
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/rpcbind.service; indirect; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead) since Fri 2017-03-31 16:17:05 WIB; 49s ago
 Main PID: 6763 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

[...log messages...]
Mar 31 16:17:05 myhost systemd[1]: Stopped RPC bind service.

● rpcbind.socket - RPCbind Server Activation Socket
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/rpcbind.socket; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead) since Fri 2017-03-31 16:17:48 WIB; 6s ago
   Listen: /var/run/rpcbind.sock (Stream)
           [::]:111 (Stream)
           0.0.0.0:111 (Stream)

[...log messages...]
Mar 31 16:17:48 myhost systemd[1]: Closed RPCbind Server Activation Socket.
Mar 31 16:17:48 myhost systemd[1]: Stopping RPCbind Server Activation Socket.

Answer 3

With systemd the way to stop services starting at boot is to use the disable option, so in this instance you would use the command systemctl disable rpcbind, below is an example of the output I see when running on my Fedora 20 system;

chris::test::07:08:29-> sudo systemctl disable rpcbind
rm '/etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/rpcbind.service'
rm '/etc/systemd/system/sockets.target.wants/rpcbind.socket'