Arch's cloud image enables systemd-time-wait-sync, and sshd is ordered after pacman-init, which waits for time-sync.target. Once provision.sh turns off systemd-networkd, systemd-timesyncd thinks it's offline and never syncs, so every boot after the base build waited forever and the installed image's build failed with "The VM didn't answer on SSH". Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>