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New Year's Resolutions For *nix SysAdmins (cyberciti.biz)
An anonymous reader writes: A new year, with old systems. It is time to break bad old habits and develop good new ones. This list talks about new years resolutions for Linux and Unix sysadmins. List includes turning on 2FA on all services, making peace with systemd, installing free SSL/TLS certificates, avoiding laptops with horrible screens or wireless whitelist in BIOS, building Linux gaming rig and more. What resolutions are on your list regarding sysadmin or IT work in 2016?
I'm sort of right behind you. I can understand SystemD for creating the tools to make a good desktop. However, tools that make a good desktop do not necessarily make a good server. That's where I see the problem.
I run Linux Mint on my desktop and as long as it works, I don't really care what's under the hood. However, I also maintain servers where I care very much what happens under the hood. For example, I care about being able to read plain text logs and I don't understand what possible reason there could be for storing logs in a binary format. I also don't see the need to have a super complex system configuring my network interface simply because in a typical server environment your IP address doesn't change often, if at all.
I'm definitely looking at FreeBSD again (it's been 15 years since I touched any BSD outside of monowall/pfsense) and am using it for a new project at work that's currently in Alpha testing phase. I'm doing it because it's more in line with my KISS preferences but I will admit that I miss iproute2.
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
This is a problem with "old vs new".
sys V init is old. So are the old, genuine unix wizards.
SystemD is new. So is Pottering and Pals.
The divide comes from "old culture" vs "new culture." The old unix culture adores simplicity, sparseness, and adaptability.
The "old culture" knows that a server is just part of a bigger process, and reliability and maintainability are more important than simplicity, sparseness (whatever that means in this context), and adaptability. Without something like systemd, Linux cannot be enterprise ready. "Rolling your own" scripts for failover and redundancy is the worst idea when more than one admin has to diagnose problems at 2:00 AM. You want something supported by the vender, with standard configuration options, that can be easily understood by everyone on the team. Sometimes the "most elegant" solution is not the best for the business.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
I don't buy that init scripts are simple or even particularly adaptable. I've hand crafted a few in my time and they are always a pain in the arse to manage. When you get to the point of having multiple scripts bring called which then call sub scripts and all of them somewhat unique to that machine... It's time to look for something better.
I have not played with systemd extensively, but it seems to have the right idea. While in theory scripts give you more control, in practice they just make it harder to admin the system and make you waste time hacking them. Having it all tied together and controllable from one place is much better.
I used to have a highly customised Firefox install. Eventually Firefox sucked enough to drive me to Chrome. At that point I realised it was better to just adapt my workflow to something better some times, instead of proclaiming it sucks because it doesn't do things the way I did a decade ago.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The real sin is the decision of the foss community to pick a side, and in so doing, remove that choice from other people, by choosing to make systemd a hard requirement, solely for their own convenience.
Did you just try to make writing software to scratch your own itch sound like a bad thing? If Poettering wants to write systemd-only software, nobody's going to stop him. Nobody should be able to stop him. Nobody's going to force him to create or maintain SysV init scripts either. And if other projects find that depending on systemd is convenient, so can they. Open source is not a democracy. Developers do what developers want, regardless of what their users think and by users I mean everybody from other projects to distro packagers to system administrators to end users. The conflict was lost when systemd was voted in as the default, trying to bend the Debian system to force developers to preserve the old ways was a fool's errand. If it had passed, all that would have happened is that Debian would have lost them. Nobody can make that kind of committee decision stick.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've been using unix (ie. only Linux but we'll pretend that counts) for over 15 years now. Not quite the "old" you may think of but old enough.
I gave systemd a try. It actively fought me and I cannot accept that. It has too much of a "my way or the highway" mentality that you just can't fix without major C hacking and recompiling. If you don't like its way of doing things then too bad.
sysvinit scripts may be slower to boot and have fewer automatic/behinds-the-scenes features you want, but I can make any arbitrary change to them with minimal effort. I can run them with line-by-line tracing using "set -x" and find out exactly why it's hanging. I can rescue it with *any* install media even if it doesn't have systemd and '/etc/init.d/servicename start' will actually work.
systemd is fine for desktops run by people who think Firefox is the only app they really need to Surf The Net. sysvinit is designed for people who want control of their systems and want to be able to inspect what it's doing. And I'm sorry, I NEED the latter to do my job properly.
The real sin is the decision of the foss community to pick a side, and in so doing, remove that choice from other people, by choosing to make systemd a hard requirement, solely for their own convenience.
Did you just try to make writing software to scratch your own itch sound like a bad thing? If Poettering wants to write systemd-only software, nobody's going to stop him. Nobody should be able to stop him. Nobody's going to force him to create or maintain SysV init scripts either. And if other projects find that depending on systemd is convenient, so can they. Open source is not a democracy. Developers do what developers want, regardless of what their users think and by users I mean everybody from other projects to distro packagers to system administrators to end users. The conflict was lost when systemd was voted in as the default, trying to bend the Debian system to force developers to preserve the old ways was a fool's errand. If it had passed, all that would have happened is that Debian would have lost them. Nobody can make that kind of committee decision stick.
I am a little suprised that someone with your UUID would have such a philosophy about the Debian project, but fair enough. I'd like to refer you to the Debian Manifesto, a document that was written when the Debian project was first founded. In particular, I'd like to refer you to section A.3:
thus, a distribution is created based on the needs and wants of the users rather than the needs and wants of the constructor.
, with "constructor" referring to the creator.
To be very clear, I am not advocating that Poettering shouldn't be programming what he pleases, nor that all work should be productive. However, I am saying that at least for the Debian project, the focus (used to be) on the users, and making a solid operating system useful to everyone. There's been a large resurgence in the "developers first" attitude the last couple years, and while it lends itself well to hobbyists, these kinds of people should not be working on a large and collaborative project with the goal of being useful to everyone - because, as you've made very clear, the center of that philosophy is all about your wants and needs, something which is directly contrary to the main goal of the Debian Project (and really, any large open source project whose goal is to be useful to more than the developers).
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."