For the umpteenth time, this morning found myself at the console of a dead Linux box, unable to bring the system up because of unreconciled or circular or otherwise out-of-sequence dependencies in systemd. An hour and a half later, during which I had none of the usual tools available to examine the system (because it wouldn't come up), I just wound up reverting a couple of tiny edits to dependencies that I'd made in the weeks since last reboot--and wound up with the same 5-manual-steps restart procedure to get past busted startup sequencing that I've endured for years.
As archaic as SysV Init is, at least the dependencies are easy to understand: if you can count from 1 to 99, you can figure out what order things are going to start up. Systemd provides several dependency-related directives: Requires, After, Before, Wants, Conflicts. Distros and packages don't use numeric prefixes for defining these directives, so I have gotten completely lost in the chaos of this-wants-that at system startup. Systemd does provide a tool that shows a hierarchical display of running processes (systemd-cgls), but it doesn't do the same thing for its own configs. My old distro (OpenSUSE 12.3) doesn't have systemd-analyze so I'm wondering if that's the tool I'm in desperate need of. I really need a "systemd-prove-it-works-before-I-reboot" troubleshooting procedure. The "dot" graphviz output doesn't help: it just creates a chart with tens of thousands of swirly circles. The bottom line is it looks like I need to carve out a weekend, or a week, to swap out the distro on which my home-server systems are built. Should I embrace or toss out systemd when I choose this new platform? -rich _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
