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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?
"making peace with systemd" Might as well make peace with terrorists.
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 new culture adores easiness, one-stop shopping, and cohesive wholes.
This argument will never really die. The old culture will point out the endless littany of security problems with software like systemd, simply because of the complexity and scope-creep of the project. (this increases its attack surface, and makes it attractive to malware authors and hackers.) The new culture will point out the endless littany of hair pulling and hours spent dealing with obtuse scripts and strange scripting behaviors for things they feel should be solvable with a mouseclick.
These two will never live under the same roof. Both are right, and both are wrong. There are systems and applications where sysVinit makes sense, and is desirable. There are systems and applications where systemd makes sense, and is desirable.
The real sin here is not heresey by either group.
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.
systemd was thrust upon everyone and you want us to accept it just because? how about this: document the code, document the interfaces, solidify the ABI, make the code portable, do a security audit instead of trying to force me to use systemd!
my resolution is to uproot systemd's tendrils from an otherwise decent operating system.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
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
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.
If a daemon needs a complex init script to manage it, then systemd won't be able to manage it at all, because it can't do everything a script can do. If systemd can manage a daemon, then it didn't need a complex init script, and you did it wrong.
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.
If you need that much complexity to run a daemon, then either your daemon sucks or you do. Unless, of course, you're just talking about simple things like script libraries. If those confuse you, perhaps Unix is not for you. Shell scripting is a core Unix feature.
If you could explain cogently what you meant, perhaps you would get different responses. But so far, you're talking bananas. Systemd's unit files are merely a handful of name-value pairs, they don't even need sections because all of the names are unique (even between sections) but they put sections into them anyway because systemd is all about obfuscation, and needless effort. Systemd's "additional functionality" (unit files, cgroups support) could be replaced by a relatively small shell script, based on existing init scripts. Indeed, any distribution which uses script libraries in its init scripts could have done this cheaply. For example, cgroups are a kernel feature manipulated via short, common commands, like creating directories.
I used to have a highly customised Firefox install. Eventually Firefox sucked enough to drive me to Chrome.
I used to use Chrome for Google services. Eventually Google fucked Chrome hard enough to break Youtube ad-blockers. Then I realized that people who use Chrome are Part Of The Problem.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The "old culture" knows that a server is just part of a bigger process, and reliability and maintainability are more important than simplicity,
That is why Systemd is fail. Shell scripts have reliability and maintainability. Systemd complicates troubleshooting of the boot process, and requires that we trust code written by a known lame. Remember pulseaudio? I sure do. I spent hours fighting with it.
Without something like systemd, Linux cannot be enterprise ready.
Why?
"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.
Only if your goal is to hire sysadmins too stupid to comprehend shell scripts. The problem is that people that dumb are also too stupid to troubleshoot problems. Try hiring some of the many out-of-work qualified sysadmins who actually know Unix, instead of an H1-B or some kid just out of school.
You want something supported by the vender, with standard configuration options, that can be easily understood by everyone on the team.
And that is how vendors have been using Unix since forever. With shell scripts, supported by the vendor, with standard control flow, that can be easily understood by anyone intelligent enough to be a systems administrator to begin with. Your complaint is that the point and click Microsoft-or-Apple-fanboy-wannabe-sysadmin cannot point and grunt his way through poorly implementing Unix configuration. No one who knows what they are doing will have sympathy for that idea, because there are so very many qualified professionals going unemployed right now. It's not hard to get people who know what they are doing, if you try to hire them. You don't want to do that. You want to hire idiots and you want magically good results. But someone incapable of systems administration without systemd will simply fall flat on their face when a problem crops up, and because they're using systemd it will be harder to troubleshoot the problem.
TL;DR: A monkey who can't understand a shell script can't be a real sysadmin anyway. All they can be is a button puncher. They should work in a NOC, and you should hire someone who knows Unix to administer Unix.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They're not trying to force exclusive ipv6 on you, they're trying to make you go dual stack which you absolutely should.
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What we need to support is private cloud solutions,
No, junior. That's called a cluster. Cloud computing is when you spin up instances as you need them, and get billed appropriately. We don't need systemd for clusters. They predate it dramatically. And we're already using virtualization, which also doesn't require systemd. If there's anything else old that's new again that you would like explained for you using only short words, let me know. I'm here for you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
As an example for the problems with troubleshooting, I've recently installed a few Ubuntu 15.10 systems (bare metal and in VMware VMs). In both scenarios, NFS filesystems fail to be mounted at boot. Why? I have no bloody clue. There's nothing in the logs. If I umount them (they are showing as mounted but give immediate I/O error on use) and remount by hand it all works just fine. No idea how to troubleshoot it. With sysvinit I could boot to an interactive shell in the late initramfs and step through every script by hand, and pinpoint exactly where something was failing. With systemd, even with correctly configured systems, I still experience occasional unrecoverable hangs at boot as it screws up its nondeterministic boot ordering and waits forever on something or other (who knows what it might be). systemd has absolutely not improved boot reliability. If I boot a FreeBSD system with exactly the same NFS configuration, it mounts everything perfectly at boot every damned time.
Another thing, is the broken compatibility with what came before. Example: I edit /etc/nfsidmap.conf to configure NFSv4 id mapping. Previously I'd reload/restart the nfs-common service with 'service' or 'invoke-rc.d'. Job done. What's the systemd equivalent? I don't know, and I can't see any obvious candidate. Since both these commands now forward to systemd, a diligent engineer would have made the old service names forward to the new target(s) to retain compatibility, maybe with a helpful message indicating what the new names were. There's nothing. I don't see any obvious nfsidmap or generic rpc or nfs units. Yes, it's partly me lacking familiarity with the new way of doing things; but the lack of care in having a smooth transition for admins makes for a terrible time, and the mess of units makes the whole thing difficult to comprehend as a whole and baroquely overcomplicated.
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."