Logging for errors during config

[Richard Laager]

On 2026-02-19 01:09, Hal Murray via devel wrote:
> I
> tried editing  /usr/lib/systemd/system/ntpd.service, but the next install
> undid that.

Side point: You should not edit files in /usr/lib/systemd for exactly 
this reason. Depending on the circumstances and/or personal taste, you 
should either A) use a drop-in file, or B) override the unit by copying 
it to /etc/systemd and editing there.

My personal taste is to use drop-in files whenever practical. That way, 
I still pick up other changes to the distro/upstream provided service 
file. It also plays well with configuration management systems like 
Ansible. Note that you can have multiple drop-in files for different 
purposes, which may or may not matter to you (but can be really nice at 
even modest scale, again when using something like Ansible).

Both options are available using `systemctl edit UNIT`, which does 
things like automatically launch your $EDITOR. Without a flag, you will 
get option A, a drop-in file named override.conf. If you add the 
`--full` flag, it will do option "B" for you.

Note that a Unit can have multiple ExecStart commands. So in this case 
where you want to modify the ExecStart (as opposed to just add another 
command), your drop-in file needs to first clear ExecStart, like this:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/ntpd -g -N -u ntp:ntp -YOUR -NEW -OPTIONS

If you are replacing the whole file (option "B"), then of course you can 
edit the existing ExecStart directly.

-- 
Richard