I did some more research into this. The root cause is that back in
March, systemd removed all their support for SysV init. This is going
to eventually affect anyone with legacy init.d scripts on a distro
that runs systemd.
Here's a summary of what changed [1]:
> On March 17, 2026, systemd 260 shipped as the newest stable release
> — and it cut a bridge that had been standing since the 1980s.
> systemd 260 SysV removed is not a deprecation warning or a soft
> cutoff. Every component that handled legacy System V init scripts is
> gone: systemd-sysv-generator, rc-local.service, and the entire SysV
> compatibility layer are deleted. Beyond that removal, systemd 260
> also raises the minimum kernel requirement from 5.4 to 5.10,
> introduces a new mstack framework for OverlayFS-based service
> deployments, and adds a unified metrics pipeline via
> systemd-report. If you manage Linux servers that still rely on SysV
> init scripts, this version breaks them silently.
The main issue I had was that I was setting up my networking using
ifupdown instead of netplan. The folks on #ubuntu told me that
ifupdown has been deprecated for some time. I had no idea. I'm sure I
just followed instructions on the Linode website when I setup this
box, and since everything worked for so long, I had no reason to tweak
anything.
Fortunately my network configuration was simple and I've generated a
netplan config that seems to be working. But I feel like other stuff
is likely to be broken too and I should work on setting up a new
Linode from scratch with the latest tools.
Walt
1.
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On Sat, Oct 24, 2026 at 01:58:09PM -0400, Walt Mankowski via plug wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I wanted to give everyone a heads up that, starting with Ubuntu 26.10,
> they've removed support for "legacy System V scripts".
>
> That's the executive summary. Read on for the gory details.
>
> This morning I decided to update my linode from Ubuntu 26.04 to
> 26.10. Usually these are quick and painless, and I thought this one
> went smoothly too. But when I rebooted and logged back in, I
> discovered that DNS wasn't working.
>
> I went to #ubuntu on Libera IRC and learned that this version of
> Ubuntu removed support for init.d scripts. I originally setup this
> instance in 2017, and it uses ifupdown instead of the now-preferred
> netplan.
>
> To be fair, this change was in the release notes[1], but it's fairly
> far down. I would have expected a change like this, which is likely to
> break a lot of older systems going forward, would have been featured
> much more prominently than it is.
>
> So what to do now?
>
> I opened a ticket with Linode about whether I can restore to 26.04
> from my backups. I'm also researching how to convert ifupdown to
> netplan.
>
> In at attempt to limp along with what I have for now, I first tried this:
>
> sudo resolvectl dns eth0 1.1.1.1 8.8.8.8
>
> That worked for a while, but then when I checked later I saw that
> `resolvectl status` was no longer showing it! Next I tried something a
> bit more permanent. I added
>
> DNS=1.1.1.1 8.8.8.8
>
> to /etc/systemd/resolved.conf. That's working for now, but I wouldn't
> be surprised if some process restores that file to its default and
> erases my change.
>
> Probably the best solution going forward is configure a new Linode
> instance, but that's more work than I'm feeling up for just now.
>
> To be completely honest, I'm agnostic about System V init vs
> systemd. I just want something that works. But what really got me
> upset was the attitude in the Ubuntu IRC channel that this was my
> fault for not updating a system that had been working flawlessly for
> nearly a decade, and not theirs for removing a key legacy support
> feature with essentially no warning at all.
>
> Sigh.
>
> Walt
>
> 1.
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