delete systemd not-found services

Question

My server shows multiple missing services. How can i delete them from Systemd? They are not-found.

systemctl -a shows: multiple not found
systemctl reset-failed shows: still shows

These (none of them are in /etc/systemd/ or /lib/systemd):

exim4.service - i use postfix, i never installed
apache2.service - i use nginx

Thanks!

Solution

systemd tries to load all services which are mentioned in Wants=, Requires=, After=, Before=, RequiresMountsFor=, Conflicts=, Requisite=, PartOf=, …, x-systemd.requires=, x-systemd.requires-mounts-for=, systemd.unit=, SYSTEMD_WANTS=, and also symlinked in .wants and .requires and probably some other places I forgot.

The units you're seeing must be mentioned somewhere. Systemd doesn't know anything about apache2 or exim4 by itself. Note that systemd will generate "wrapper" services for sysvinit scripts.

Having those services listed in systemctl --all output is harmless. There's no need to "delete" them.

Comments

[Admin]

Good question, I see that I have a not-found mysql service. I can find no files named mysql in /etc/systemd or /lib/systemd, nor do I find any mentions of "mysql" if I grep those directories. It's not at all clear why systemd has a reference to this service that it can't find.

[Admin]

exactly! true! ...

[Admin]

What distro are you using? If Debian/Ubuntu, then those might be sysv services.

[Admin]

debian / systemd

[Mark Stosberg]

In my case, I eventually found a mysql reference in /etc/init.d/postfix on this line: # Should-Start: postgresql mysql clamav-daemon postgrey spamassassin saslauthd dovecot. I presume that must be where systemd is picking up the reference to it.