After a Debian Unstable upgrade a couple of months ago, dhcpd (from the isc-dhcp-server package) would no longer start automatically. This is because it relies on a sysvinit startup script, and systemd has finally removed support for that. Looks like upstream development of that project has largely ceased, in favour of a more elaborate successor that I am in no hurry to switch to, for my simple home-internal needs. You can actually manually launch /usr/sbin/dhcpd as root and it will automatically fork a daemon process, but this got a bit tiresome. So I created a systemd service definition for it: [Unit] Description=ISC DHCP Server [Install] WantedBy=network.target [Service] Type=forking ExecStart=/usr/sbin/dhcpd TimeoutStopSec=5 Restart=always That’s just under a dozen lines, including blank ones -- not a bad replacement for a sysvinit script that is nearly 200 lines in size ...