Goss checks fail on Ubuntu Xenial

Question

Our systems are Ubuntu Xenial with Systemd removed, and we're using goss for validating system configurations. Our VM image build process suddenly started failing with goss complaining that a number of services that should be running allegedly aren't:

...
Service: postfix: enabled:
Expected
    <bool>: false
to equal
    <bool>: true
Service: postfix: running:
Expected
    <bool>: false
to equal
    <bool>: true

Service: ssh: enabled:
Expected
    <bool>: false
to equal
    <bool>: true
Service: ssh: running:
Expected
    <bool>: false
to equal
    <bool>: true
...

However, I verified that the services are, in fact, up and running, as they should, so goss is reporting incorrectly here.

Answer 1

As it turns out, uninstalling the package systemd after replacing Systemd with Upstart doesn't actually remove some of the files installed by that package, namely /bin/systemctl. But goss uses the presence or absence of that file to decide how it checks service states.

We didn't run into this issue before, because we were using an older goss version that would fall back to SysV init scripts. However, that fallback got removed in version 0.3.8 (per issue #319), so when we updated goss to a more recent version the checks started failing.

After removing /bin/systemctl the checks worked correctly again.