Comment 10 for bug 1956787

I conjecture that the problem occurred when moving from init scripts to systemd. It's pretty clear that the default in the nfs-common init script was to start statd. I conjecture that when converting to systemd, someone forgot to put a Wants in nfs-server. It's got an after but not a Wants. Writing the unit file with an [Install] section implies an explicit enable, but you probably don't want that. You probably want nfs-server to start it.

It wouldn't be easy to start it the first time a client mounts via NFS 3, without a kernel upcall, so I think nfs-common was right to default to using it.

But it looks like nfs-common is a vestige of the init script days and isn't used except in single user.

For what it's worth, centos 7 has a nearly identical unit file for rpc-statd, except it's missing the [Install] section (presumably because it's intended to be invoked by other things and not explicitly enabled). There are Wants for autofs and nfs-server.

I think adding Wants to at least nfs-server makes sense.

rpc-statd.service doesn't have an install section