Systemd shows all services as dead

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Well my understanding was that socket activation would start the ssh service as required, rather than at boot, to save upon memory. The original announcement [1] doesn’t explicitly state this, but that is my experience, unless I am totally misunderstanding. This is on Ubuntu 24.10:

Before anyone has ssh’d in:

$ systemctl status ssh.service
○ ssh.service - OpenBSD Secure Shell server
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/ssh.service; disabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: inactive (dead)
TriggeredBy: ● ssh.socket
       Docs: man:sshd(8)
             man:sshd_config(5)

After someone has ssh’d in:

$ systemctl status ssh.service
● ssh.service - OpenBSD Secure Shell server
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/ssh.service; disabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Mon 2025-01-06 10:35:10 GMT; 4s ago
 Invocation: 25b46717ee034d65ba56b123faec61d2
TriggeredBy: ● ssh.socket
       Docs: man:sshd(8)
             man:sshd_config(5)
    Process: 36994 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/sshd -t (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Main PID: 36995 (sshd)

[1] SSHd now uses socket-based activation (Ubuntu 22.10 and later)