Bind enabled although I never enabled it (and that creates problems)

I have a mobile phone (replicant) with MAXS using ejabberd on the freedombox for XMPP transport. The phone sends a battery status message roughly every 3 minutes.

This morning, I noticed on my desktop that the connection to ejabberd was lost and the last status received from the phone is around 4am. On the phone, if I stop and start the XMPP transport again, I have errors to find the names to connect to ejabberd.

I looked at ejabberd diagnostics, most diagnostics are in error. In Cockpit, I see a failure for Bind to start (not for ejabberd). I check in plinth, Bind is indeed marked as enabled. However, I am 100% sure I never enabled Bind.

I disabled Bind, then looked into Cockpit, told to start ejabberd (although it is already started), looked at ejabberd diagnostics, now it works.

How could Bind be enabled although I never enabled it?

EDIT: This problem has also made Radicale and Quassel fail, very unpleasant.

Have you installed bind app FreedomBox interface and then disabled it? Or did you never install bind?

Also, to ensure that the service never is accidentally started as dependency of another service, run this:

systemctl mask named.service

I am not sure I understand your question. In the applications, I don’t see any bind app, I see bind in the system menu (in which I have not seen any option to install something).

Thanks, I just did that.

Bind is similar to an app in the apps section. It is not installed or enabled by default. Clicking on the bind page should show an installation request. It is also not a dependency for any other app (neither is the bind9 package) and should not have been installed automatically. Is it possible that you have installed the app earlier and forgot about it?

I clicked on every link in the app and in the system menu to see what was in there but I did not expect it would have the side effect of installing things.

If clicking on BIND installs bind, then yes, I am sure I have done this.

Umm… installation only happens after clicking on the install button and not by clicking on the pages. If that happened, it would be a bug we like to fix. BTW, bind will also receive fixes to make it less disruptive to other services.

Do keep an eye out and report a bug in the issue tracker if necessary.

BIND is an option in the net-inst menus. A user can install that before they install FreedomBox. I had good success starting with bare minimum debian installation before adding FreedomBox.