0007709: Running systemctl enable or systemctl disable on a non-systemd unit fails

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update

0007709	Kali Linux	General Bug	public	2022-05-14 18:44	2025-07-14 09:17

Reporter	steev	Assigned To	daniruiz
Priority	normal	Severity	minor	Reproducibility	always
Status	closed	Resolution	no change required
Product Version	2022.2

Summary	0007709: Running systemctl enable or systemctl disable on a non-systemd unit fails
Description	While testing for the 2022.2 release, one issue found is that running systemctl disable ssh will prompt you for a password, however, it doesn't pass the elevated privileges to update-rc.d and results in a Permission denied error from update-rc.d This worked previously, but doesn't now, a workaround exists in just using sudo systemctl disable ssh Noticed on the arm images where we enable ssh by default, this happens on all architectures. kali@kali:~$ systemctl enable ssh Synchronizing state of ssh.service with SysV service script with /lib/systemd/systemd-sysv-install. Executing: /lib/systemd/systemd-sysv-install enable ssh update-rc.d: error: Permission denied
Steps To Reproduce	Launch a terminal Run `systemctl enable ssh` or `systemctl disable ssh`
Additional Information	This worked in previous releases, and probably needs to be submitted to Debian as I don't believe it's a change we made.

daniruiz 2022-05-20 10:53 manager ~0016178	This is not new in kali 2022.2, it has always been this way You should run systemctl enable/disable with sudo instead. If you don't add sudo it will open a password dialog and try to run it with polkit, but that doesn't work with systemctl enable/disable. For some reason it does work with systemctl start/stop. Here is the bugreport in systemd https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4957

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
2022-05-14 18:44	steev	New Issue
2022-05-20 10:53	daniruiz	Note Added: 0016178
2022-05-20 10:54	daniruiz	Assigned To	=> daniruiz
2022-05-20 10:54	daniruiz	Status	new => closed
2022-05-20 10:54	daniruiz	Resolution	open => no change required
2025-07-14 09:17	g0tmi1k	Priority	low => normal