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SystemD Gains New Networking Features

jones_supa writes A lot of development work is happening on systemd with just the recent couple of weeks seeing over 200 commits. With the most recent work that has landed, the networkd component has been improved with new features. Among the additions are IP forwarding and masquerading support (patch). This is the minimal support needed and these settings get turned on by default for container network interfaces. Also added was minimal firewall manipulation helpers for systemd's networkd. The firewall manipulation helpers (patch) are used for establishing NAT rules. This support in systemd is provided by libiptc, the library used for communicating with the Linux kernel's Netfilter and changing iptables firewall rulesets. Those wishing to follow systemd development on a daily basis and see what is actually happening under the hood, can keep tabs via the systemd Git viewer.

23 of 553 comments (clear)

  1. Fuck Me by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Christ almighty, this beast is a fucking monster. What's next, a shell and a userland?

    Glad I'm heading to FreeBSD. Linux is going down the tubes.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    1. Re: Fuck Me by chill · · Score: 5, Funny

      Shell and userland? What do you think it is, Emacs?

      --
      Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    2. Re:Fuck Me by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm sure they do. But FreeBSD doesn't have a massive init system intruding itself into every single aspect of the operating system.

      Just what the fuck is SystemD supposed to be?

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    3. Re:Fuck Me by mlts · · Score: 5, Informative

      I try to stay out of the systemd fray... but it goes against the core of UNIX... which is the KISS principle.

      Init should start tasks, possibly stick them into jails or containers, and set resource limitations. Having something do everything including the kitchen sink is just asking to get hacked down the road unless millions of dollars are spent on source code audits.

      As an IT person, results are important. What does systemd provide that previous mechanisms didn't. Parallel startup? I don't boot servers that often where asynchronous startup of processes is a big issue. Resource limits? Doable with the shell script that gets plopped into /etc/rc.d. I'm just not seeing the benefit, but what I am seeing is a gigantic amount of code which touches the entire system, giving me concerns about security and stability, and there have been a number of articles on /. about systemd, to the point where people are even forking distros just so they don't have to deal with it.

    4. Re:Fuck Me by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Informative

      Just what the fuck is SystemD supposed to be?

      A services manager, actually. It starts and stops services on the system, and if they go down, it optionally restarts them. The fact that many services need to start when the system starts is somewhat incidental to the purpose of systemD.

      On top of the services manager, they've built a lot of services. Here is the video that explains launchD, which is heavily copied by systemD.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    5. Re:Fuck Me by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yes, I can see it now. A stripped Linux kernel will boot, and then in turn will boot the SystemD-OS. The whole thing will be like DOS 3.3 and Windows 3.1, except CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT will be binary files that require special userland tools to decode and manipulate.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    6. Re: Fuck Me by unixisc · · Score: 5, Funny

      Couldn't we port Emacs on SystemD and have a complete OS?

    7. Re:Fuck Me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      the fact that systemD integrates itself so closely with my GNU^H^H^HSystemD/Linux as PID 1 with a crapload of bloat (that leads to irrecoverable crashes that are marked as wontfix), is against the unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it good.

      Sounds like it does do one thing and one thing well: break systems and cause giant slashdot threads. Oh wait, that's two things. It does need more focus after all.

    8. Re:Fuck Me by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, it's not, you're wrong. It's ripping off OSX's launchD. He's an Apple copier, not a Microsoft copier (and as far as system design goes, that is much, much better; launchD is infinity times cleaner than Service Control Manager).

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    9. Re: Fuck Me by irussel · · Score: 5, Funny

      you would still need a decent text editor.

    10. Re:Fuck Me by BronsCon · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Even worse, try requiring LDAP (not just making it an option when an account isn't found locally, actually requiring it) for logins on a system booting via SystemD. Have your recovery media handy, you'll have to boot from it in order to remove the LDAP requirement when SystemD can't su because the network isn't up yet (or, if the LDAP server is localhost, slapd hasn't started because, guess what, it needs to su to its configured user during its init process).

      Major issue affecting Ubuntu and, as far as I know, all Debian-based systems. The workaround should be simple: allow local account logins right up until TTYs actually become available, regardless of configuration. But, apparently, LDAP isn't considered important, so this has been an issue for as long as Debian has used SystemD and will likely remain so until Debian moves on to something else.

      The current "recommended" workaround is a pair of ifup/down scripts that requires LDAP when the interface is up and makes it optional when it interface is down, which is great until your system crashes or you lose power and the "optional" config doesn't get applied. Then, it's time to whip out the recovery media so you can manually change the config and have a bootable system again. Needless to say, I refuse to implement that hack of a fix.

      Instead, I ended up leaving LDAP optional, with a single user able to sign in, locally only, who can only su, and a local admin account that can only sudo and su, but can't log in. At least that minimizes the risk of not being able to unilaterally change either user's password across multiple systems in a timely manner; an attacker knowing the password for the user who can log in locally would have to be at the machine, and they still couldn't do anything without also knowing the username and password of the user who can sudo+su. In the end, I guess I get the benefit of being able to log in to said machines even when the LDAP server is unavailable, but it still shouldn't be necessary to implement such workarounds.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    11. Re:Fuck Me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Or the echo chamber could be wrong about PID 1.

      Like all great lies, it includes a bit of truth:

      1. More lines of code equals more bugs.
      2. The systemd project has lots of lines of code.
      3. PID 1 must be super reliable or bad things will happen.

      So far so good right? Stay tuned for the lie:

      4. All of systemd is in PID 1. Therefore systend's PID 1 must be buggy and dangerous.

      It's about as right as including Bash's line count in a discussion about sysvinit PID1. But don't take my word for it. Echo on bro.

  2. systemd... by aardvarkjoe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    systemd seems dead set on becoming an alternative operative system.

    Which wouldn't be a bad thing if it wasn't ruining perfectly good operating systems like Debian while it grows.

    I've stuck with Debian for a pretty long time (since around 2000) mostly because I know how everything works. But in the last year running testing, more and more frequently I'll find that something has been yanked out and replaced by something harder to use and understand. Maybe it's finally time to switch to BSD instead.

    --

    How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
  3. Re:Will SystemD feature creep ever stop ? by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just wait for SystemD VM Hypervisor. It will be SystemDs all the way down.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  4. What has happened to Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What the hell is happening to the Linux ecosystem?

    I've been a user of it for a couple of decades now. Although it wasn't perfect, for years it provided a better environment for me than Windows or even OS X could provide.

    But that's really started to change maybe within the past 5 years. The first major debacle I can think of is GNOME 3. They went out of their way to ignore everything good about GNOME 2, and instead forced all sorts of stupid ideas upon us.

    Firefox is the next debacle I can think of. It's a lot like GNOME 3 in many ways. There was a good, reliable, usable browser in Firefox 3.5. Then it all went to hell in Firefox 4 and beyond.

    Now we have systemd, which is obviously dumb in pretty much all respects. It just doesn't fit within the Linux ecosystem at all. That's probably why it's so disruptive.

    What makes systemd worse, though, is the impact it has had on pretty much all of the major Linux distros. Pretty much all of the most usable and useful ones (sorry, Slackware, this excludes you) have switched to it, with horrible results.

    The stability of my Debian testing system has gone down the shitter since they switched to systemd some time ago. I've had more problems properly booting my system in the past six months than I had in the 15 years prior to systemd getting installed.

    I'm torn at this point. I'm probably going to buy a Mac and move to OS X for my personal system, while moving all of my servers over to FreeBSD as soon as I can. I'm pretty sure that I'm done with Linux at this point. I just don't think the ecosystem can be salvaged. So much good software has been ruined.

    1. Re:What has happened to Linux? by amiga3D · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think they intend to bring stability and unity to Linux by eliminating modularity and choice.

  5. FYI: FreeBSD now available on Digital Ocean by CrashNBrn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I asked a few months back now, about the possibility of BSD on Digital Ocean due to all of the SystemD shenanigans of late. Got an email notification today that FreeBSD droplets are now available on Digital Ocean. It will be interesting to see if other VPS/Linux providers follow suit.

    CB.

  6. Re:Will SystemD feature creep ever stop ? by knorthern+knight · · Score: 5, Informative

    > Why do you care how other people build their Linux systems?

    I don't. If Poettering and company had simply forked GNOME Lenna-X off of GNU Linu-X, there wouldn't be all this complaining. The problem is that Poettering and company have hijacked mainstream linux that almost all linux users use and changed it into something unrecognizable. udev is now built into systemd. The "udev install process" on Gentoo consists of building systemd, but only installing the udev portion. That's why the eudev fork. And some people are running with busybox/mdev in place of udev.

    Then there's also dbus, which is being rammed into the kernel. Gnumeric was a great spreadsheet a couple of years ago. But now it's picking up GNOME dependancies all over the place, including dbus. And Skype now requires PulseAudio, another piece of crud from Lennart.

    --

    I'm not repeating myself
    I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
  7. Re:Stop. Just fucking STOP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Where do you get that idea? There's no IP forwarding and masquerading in the init process. That all happens in the networkd process.

  8. Re:Time to have them fork off by reikae · · Score: 5, Funny

    The viola will depend on PulseAudio so you'll have to include that too.

  9. systemd is hypocritical by beaverdownunder · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It annoys me that someone like Poettering, who only had PulseAudio come into use because of the ability distributions had to easily change core operating system components (and wouldn't have had the existing audio-subsystem been entrenched), would then proceed to develop something specifically intended to lock down its own existence and prevent its replacement by something else. It's hypocritical.

    While I totally understand why he did it -- nobody wants to put a great amount of time into something only to have it superseded -- it flies in the face of open source in general, where you contribute to an evolving 'thing', and that while your specific contribution may not exist in the future, you can be happy that you took part in the evolution of the whole, and not feel the need to stamp your face on it for perpetuity.

    It also sets a dangerous precedent. What's going to be locked down next, in the name of stability, or speed, or whatever else (when it's really about someone trying to 'make their mark'?) Do we lock down the file system? Only one file system for Linux, full stop? Do we lock down the network transports? The window manager? The terminal? The command-line applications?

    Then what? Do we then create a global committee, made up of people who maintain the existing components (of course), to make decisions about those components and whatever's left into the future?

    I mean, yes, I agree in that case something else will surely (and quickly) rise in Linux's place (I mean, who wants to put in the time to help projects who only exist to serve their creator's vanity) but it seems a shame that Linux should end this way.

  10. Re:All Linux distros will look like this by turbidostato · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Here, in Lennart's own words"

    No, *this* are Lennart's own words:
    let's summarize what we are trying to do:
    * We want an efficient way that allows vendors to package their software
    * We want to allow end users and administrators to install these packages on their systems, regardless which distribution they have installed on it.
    * We want a unified solution that ultimately can cover updates for full systems, OS containers, end user apps, programming ABIs, and more.
    * We want our images to be trustable (i.e. signed). In fact we want a fully trustable OS

    So my reading is: we want Linux ecosystem to disappear and be substituted by Microsoft's business model where there's just one OS (Red Hat) and a set of corporate software vendors.

  11. Re:Put away your pitch forks by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Informative

    unless of course you want to start a script with a unit file but then are you sure that iptables is up?

    In all my time using Linux, wondering if iptables had crashed has never been a problem I've had. I've had lots of problems, but never that one. Same with filesystems. Fstab has always just worked.

    And an extra layer in front of iptables is the last thing I need. That is a huge negative. I don't even understand why anyone would think that's a good idea.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."