Comment 8 for bug 1786675

> to add, I believe that even when there are no physical NICs, there is always a loopback interface on every machine, and this would trigger as soon as the loopback interface is configured (127.0.0.1)

In a test I arranged for a container to fail to get DHCP, and network-online.target didn't fire there until something (DHCP? Something more systemd related?) had timed out.

I believe it's still incorrect to general service starts on network-online.target in the general case. Road warrior laptop developers, for example, might expect apache2 available on the loopback interface, which isn't necessarily included in the definition of network-online.target.

I believe systemd upstream agrees with me, as documented on the page you found (https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/NetworkTarget/).

If you disagree, please take this to the mailing list. Otherwise you're just arguing with me rather than with a general Ubuntu developer audience, and that's not going to get you anywhere anyway.

In any case, the solution (or workaround if you still see this as a valid bug) for your situation is easy enough: override what you need in /etc/systemd/system/apache2.service.d/ as documented by systemd.