Systemd service life cycle

[Tom H]

On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 6:20 PM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9 April 2016 at 16:44, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> "oneshot" is better for your use-case. I forgot...
>
> What is the reason for oneshot being better than forking in this case?
>
> I need to leave the tunnel process running so I would have thought
> forking is a better fit.
>
> In fact this has all become academic (though still interesting) as I
> realised that actually I would be much better to move the process at
> the other end of the tunnel into this server and then I don't need the
> tunnel, and in fact it is better there for other reasons anyway.

It's for a unit that doesn't have any active processes after ExecStart
runs. I've used it for setting up networking and firewalling, for
example.