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Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]

cfp.all-systems-go.io

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Re: Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]

#3

Post by hiciu »

talk / context: https://streaming.media.ccc.de/asg2019/relive/164

edit: I think the most important part of the talk was an answer to question about why .ssh/authorized_keys won't be possible with this scheme (42:00):

> this is about protecting your data from the system as much as possible, so that when you are not logged in it's really cut off

This looks like, among other things, an ecryptfs replacement.

Re: Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]

#4

Post by danmg »

I'm going to pass on this one. How is /etc not 'extensible'? You just add a new file to the directory. Reinventing the windows registry, but this time in JSON, is a lateral move that is only going to complicate maintaining systems.

For user level configuration, you already have too many competing mechanisms for doing this already, and this one requires systemd level integration making it much more coupled to the operating system and system in general.

Re: Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]

#5

Post by amaccuish »

danmg wrote: post #4

I'm going to pass on this one. How is /etc not 'extensible'? You just add a new file to the directory. Reinventing the windows registry, but this time in JSON, is a lateral move that is only going to complicate maintaining systems. For user level configuration, you already have too many competing mechanisms for doing this already, and this one requires systemd level integration making it much more coupled to the oper…

Actually I'd really like a good user config system. dconf already works pretty well for GUI-environment related things. The problem with the win registry is it isn't all tied up and schema'd. So deleting an app doesn't delete its registry entries (at least for traditional win32 apps).

For /etc I'm not so sure, I've really come round to .ini style files.

I just hope the LDAP integration of this works well. I have a feeling that Poettering won't give a shit if it doesn't work with Active Directory...

And more PKCS#11 support would be great, I love my smartcards :)

Re: Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]

#7

Post by LinuxBender »

I am not comfortable with the feature creep that systemd is slowing bringing in. binfmt mount executing files based on a lookup, similar to windows assoc, intercepting gethostbyname(), this really feels like an attempt to shim old vulnerable windows concepts into linux. I am concerned that linux will not be recognizable in the near future and will be subject to bloat and obfuscation. What would it take to make this stop?

There are some things brought in that I like, but I don't believe systemd is required for them. Cgroups, LXC, to name a couple. Those make functional and operational sense to me.

Re: Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]

#9

Post by ColanR »

LinuxBender wrote: post #7

I am not comfortable with the feature creep that systemd is slowing bringing in. binfmt mount executing files based on a lookup, similar to windows assoc, intercepting gethostbyname(), this really feels like an attempt to shim old vulnerable windows concepts into linux. I am concerned that linux will not be recognizable in the near future and will be subject to bloat and obfuscation. What would it take to make this s…

> What would it take to make this stop?

Probably, vote with your time and focus. Use better distributions and port software to those distributions.

Re: Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]

#10

Post by JohnFen »

LinuxBender wrote: post #7

I am not comfortable with the feature creep that systemd is slowing bringing in. binfmt mount executing files based on a lookup, similar to windows assoc, intercepting gethostbyname(), this really feels like an attempt to shim old vulnerable windows concepts into linux. I am concerned that linux will not be recognizable in the near future and will be subject to bloat and obfuscation. What would it take to make this s…

> What would it take to make this stop?

That's a great question, and I have no answers.

I'm personally still trying to decide between moving all of my machines to Slackware or moving away from Linux entirely and to BSD. I'm currently leaning toward the latter.

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