It looks like "you can just create a symlink to mask ssh.service
, before installing the package". E.g. ln -s /dev/null /etc/systemd/system/ssh.service
.
I suppose this requires that you know the name of all services created by the package.
I am aware of one minor disadvantage for this approach. If you have a masked service which is also marked as "enabled", then systemd
will log a warning during startup.
Note that a systemd
"mask" will prevent the service from being started by any method, including manually running systemctl start ssh
. So depending on what you want to do, you might want to remove the mask after you've installed the package.
If the package is ssh
, it has a specific hack you can use instead! Bad news: this implies that a specific hack is needed in the package because all the other approaches have disadvantages. But you can have a look at the approaches I considered if you like :-). Configuring my sshd securely (with automation)