[Discuss] Trying to connect to internet in Debian

[Rich Pieri]

On Sun, 18 Jan 2026 12:49:53 -0800
Ron <ron at bclug.ca> wrote:

> I know it's "not a very fashionable idea" to push back on "systemd 
> sucks", but it's 2026, systemd is everywhere, and it works just fine.
[...]
> Give a reason for "badmouthing" systemd other than "old man shakes
> fist at sky" please.

If you have ever worked with large physical servers then you would know
that this is patently not true. systemd does not "work just fine" in
this arena.

In the rush to do everything as fast as possible, systemd won't wait
for network interfaces to plumb before starting network services. It
will blithely attempt to start Apache or Dovecot or NIS or NFS mounts
or whatever before the network interfaces are up and working. And then
they fail because there's no network to bind. Which is why every big
server I deploy needs something like this in root's crontab:

@reboot /etc/admin/localstartup.sh

#!/bin/bash
sleep 120
mount -t nfs -a
systemctl start ypbind
systemctl start httpd
systemctl start dovecot

If systemd really did work just fine then I wouldn't need to resort to
this kind of obtuse hackery to get network services running.

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