On 01/16/2015 05:05 PM, Levi Pearson wrote: > I think a lot of people have become used to the "quirks" that surround > the issues that other system management solutions struggle with, and > just aren't aware of the huge variety of uses that Linux is being put > to today and the challenges that they present to system management and > coordination. Keeping a modern Linux system configured correctly is no > longer just an "init" task; it's a full-time job, with dynamic > configuration changes happening all the time. The traditional init > system surely doesn't cut it, and I think systemd's architecture is > far better equipped to handle things cleanly than any of its current > competitors.
Very well put, thank you. I agree with you. I don't admin a lot of systems anymore, but I certainly encountered some of the race conditions you describe. In fact in RH 5, there was once a bug in nss_ldap that would cause the machine not to boot if the LDAP server was hosted on the same machine. Normally I'd recommend against having LDAP running on the same machine where nss_ldap is required, say for samba, but in a small office sometimes you have a lot of things running on one server. I encountered boot-stopping things enough that I typically would edit /etc/inittab and start a getty right at the beginning of the init process just so I could always log in and fix things if they got stuck. That and writing init scripts. Yuck. So fragile, so much re-inventing the wheel. On the LAS show, Poettering talked about how they looked at a lot of common daemons on Linux, and many of them didn't quite implement daemonizing completely correctly. So systemd reduces the complexity there a lot, and places daemonizing code in a place where it can be verified and audited. And I would wager that RH's engineers have gone over systemd code with a fine-tooth comb. For daemons I write myself, I think I'd much rather create a little service file and let systemd make it into a daemon. It's exciting to see where Linux could go in the future. Maybe shedding a few slashdotters to *BSDs isn't a bad thing. But I think BSD will have to grapple with these issues eventually if they want to continue moving forward. Commercial Unix certainly is trying to (SMF, launchd, etc). Michael /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
