Mostly for historical reasons, I'm posting here below the trace of a
Kali Linux bug that has just been deleted from their tracker.

Forensic distros are useful for many reasons. When minimal they can be
also more reliable, I guess most people here convenes. So now I'm
trying to get the Parrot OS developers interested in having a spin
based on Devuan, with no success. Unfortunately Their parrot-build
scripts are admittedly still incomplete to reproduce a release.

Anyone here has a strong (perhaps professional, hence sustainable)
interest in a forensic distro without systemd?


----- Forwarded message from Kali Linux Bug Tracker <noreply@???> -----

Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 20:59:28 +0100
From: Kali Linux Bug Tracker <noreply@???>
To: jaromil@???
Subject: [Kali Linux 0003165]: Find a way to disable most services by default with systemd

The following issue has been DELETED. 
====================================================================== 
Reported By:                newhack
Assigned To:                rhertzog
====================================================================== 
Project:                    Kali Linux
Issue ID:                   3165
Category:                   Kali Package Bug
Reproducibility:            always
Severity:                   minor
Priority:                   normal
Status:                     resolved
Target Version:             2.0
Resolution:                 fixed
Fixed in Version:           2016.2
====================================================================== 
Date Submitted:             2016-03-17 06:26 GMT
Last Modified:              2016-03-17 06:26 GMT
====================================================================== 
Summary:                    Find a way to disable most services by default with
systemd
Description: 
Kali forks update-rc.d to disable most services that depend on $network to avoid
having services be accessible without any admin configuration.

Kali Rolling switched to systemd and the hack in update-rc.d is now mostly
useless. We must find a new solution for this.
======================================================================

----------------------------------------------------------------------
(0004946) rhertzog (administrator) - 2014-12-08 14:25
https://bugs.kali.org/view.php?id=3165#c4946
----------------------------------------------------------------------
It looks like that the proper answer is using a "preset" file:
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Preset/

This answers at least how to not enable services by default. But it doesn't
answer how to not start any service in "forensic" mode. This is probably
implemented with a different "target" at boot time.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
(0004945) rhertzog (administrator) - 2014-12-09 09:10
https://bugs.kali.org/view.php?id=3165#c4945
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Unfortunately, it looks like we can't use Preset file in Debian currently. I
just filed a bug about this:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=772555

----------------------------------------------------------------------
(0004947) rhertzog (administrator) - 2015-03-25 06:05
https://bugs.kali.org/view.php?id=3165#c4947
----------------------------------------------------------------------
It looks like most of the services are still properly disabled thanks to some
systemd/update-rc.d integration. But there are corner cases when the packages
ships a .service file that does not have the same name as the init script.

I just filed http://bugs.debian.org/781155 on openbsd-inetd for example. And
also the update-rc.d integration with systemd is somewhat problematic:
http://bugs.debian.org/746580

----------------------------------------------------------------------
(0004948) jaromil (reporter) - 2015-07-22 11:30
https://bugs.kali.org/view.php?id=3165#c4948
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi there and apologies for slight off-topic, just mentioning:

In case you do experience too many problems with the systemd switch of Debian,
we have arms open over at Devuan with a beta release approaching and a complete
CI that is building packages for all original targets, see http://devuan.org

Even just an experimental branch of Kali 2.0 based on Devuan would be easy to do
and may provide a better experience for both users and developers.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
(0004949) rhertzog (administrator) - 2015-07-22 13:29
https://bugs.kali.org/view.php?id=3165#c4949
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jaromil, in fact the switch has been rather smooth for us and we look forward to
taking advantages of systemd's feature set!

----------------------------------------------------------------------
(0004950) rhertzog (administrator) - 2016-03-08 10:35
https://bugs.kali.org/view.php?id=3165#c4950
----------------------------------------------------------------------
This issue should be fixed with init-system-helpers_1.28+kali3.dsc and
base-files 2016.2.0.

base-files provides systemctl preset files and init-system-helpers has been
modified so that "deb-systemd-helper enable" calls "systemctl preset" instead of
doing the work itself.

Issue History 
Date Modified    Username       Field                    Change               
====================================================================== 
2016-03-17 06:26 newhack        New Issue                                    
2016-03-17 06:26 newhack        Issue generated from: 0003156                   

2016-07-11 20:59 g0tmi1k        Issue Deleted: 0003165                       
======================================================================

----- End forwarded message -----