A few months ago I wrote a blog post that included a brief introduction to systemd that included the following instructions:

{% raw %} sudo cp autossh.service /etc/systemd/system/ ; sudo systemctl enable autossh.service ; sudo reboot

"The first report is always wrong" is a sentiment attributed variously to Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and even William Tecumseh Sherman, and it turned out to be right this time too.

It turns out that's not the right place to put your service file. Somewhat remarkable that systemd managed to do the right thing in spite of itself.

Digital Ocean has a nice introduction to systemd - mirrored here which says that you should be /lib/systemd/system or /etc/systemd/system ... but on Debian-flavored stuff anyway, a lot of the stuff in /etc/systemd/system is links to /lib/systemd/system. So it looks as if putting stuff there is actually the right place.

More as I figure it out...