sysadmin "command o' the day"

[Howard White]

Like some other "veteran" admins, I'm a little slow coming around to the
full impact of systemd - specifically the migration away from scripts in
/etc/init.d.

DAMMIT! I used to know where to go look for things!

My new command friend - sudo systemctl --type=service

The command by itself posts the results to a "less like" display in
which one may scroll or page around. If you have a search term, you may
pipe the command to grep and narrow the output without the less.

Sorry if I am the last person to have found these commands.

Howard

[Michael Chaney]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 10:51 AM Howard White <hwh...@vcch.com> wrote:

Like some other "veteran" admins, I'm a little slow coming around to the
full impact of systemd - specifically the migration away from scripts in
/etc/init.d.

DAMMIT!  I used to know where to go look for things!

I share the sentiment, but I believe the concept of systemd is good.  I also believe the implementation is poor. Unfortunately, like a lot of things in UNIX, it will be the de facto standard now because no one will take the initiative to create something better. Even if they did, it’s difficult to overcome the momentum that systemd has.  I expect it’ll be another 20 years before it’s replaced.  A long 20 years.

At the same time, if you learn how to work with it it is useful for some things such as running background jobs as a particular user. And yes, that is possible with the old init scripts, but systemd does actually make it better if for no other reason than your background programs being automatically monitored and all that.

--

Michael Darrin Chaney, Sr.
mdch...@michaelchaney.com
http://www.michaelchaney.com/

[Csaba Toth]

"I also believe the implementation is poor."

Systemd goes against the fundamental Linux/UNIX philosophy of "files first" / "everything is a file" and "do only one thing but do that thing right". You come across binary logs and it does waaay too many things. From a security perspective it's a ticking time bomb (which already went off several many with critical exploits but the general public doesn't care). It's extremely unfortunate that the Debian core maintainers didn't opt for more explicit help or support for alternative init systems. That will fuse the current trend that all major distributions (Debian based, Ubuntu derivatives, and of course all RedHat related distributions) will be based on systemd and there's no supported alternative. Very very sad.

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[Michael Chaney]

Having non-text log files is moronic and there's no excuse for it.

There is the reality, though, that the computing world today is vastly different than the simple servers that Unix was originally designed to run on 50 years ago and some things just don't work the same.  It's true that systemd goes against the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy, but at the same time the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy sometimes goes against reality.

There are places where the old way of doing things doesn't work well or leads to terrible kludges, such as with plug & play devices.  The idea that you would add a piece of hardware to a running system would have seemed odd 50 years ago.

I think there are better ways to handle such, and there's certainly no reason to scrap init scripts for the vast majority of software packages out there.

But systemd is really here to stay and it'll be nearly impossible to replace unless something incredible comes along to replace it.  Don't hold your breath.