Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.'"
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.