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Operating Systems Without Systemd

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Re: Operating Systems Without Systemd

#121

Post by hedora »

fsh wrote: post #118
jdmg94 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's such a small sliver of linux users that the vast majority of linux users (who actually need SSH) are taking the overhead for nothing in return...

Don't use it if you don't need it. The developers made it very clear that systemd-homed is only meant for single-user laptops.

Home directory encryption is a terrible security mode for single user laptops (an attacker with disk access can simply modify the unprotected root file system and exfiltrate data after the fact). Whole disk encryption (and encrypted suspend to disk for bonus points) is simpler, more secure, and doesn’t break ssh (and all sorts of other things, like batch jobs).

Re: Operating Systems Without Systemd

#123

Post by hedora »

jiggawatts wrote: post #94
sliken wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly that it WAY more complicated than it needs to be, and it often replaces well written and tested tools with VERY poor implementations. Things like NTP, syslog, DHCPd, cron, iptables, mount, automount, handling /tmp, /dev, DNS, su/sudo, etc. Letting the init system talk to the network before userspace has the ability to setup firewalls gives me the heebie jeebies. Often the implementations of systemd don't handl…

Interesting that you list DNS, because in my experience one of the worst-implemented network protocols in pre-systemd Linux is the DNS client. The systemd implementation isn't perfect either, but it's a lot better . The design of classic Linux DNS simply assumes that 100% of Linux systems are university lab machines, and that there is a single DNS server that is 100% reliable. I've heard people making various argumen…

I had zero problems with Linux’s dns client until about 3 years ago. The systemd one and whatever it replaced took 5 seconds to resolve anything remotely last time I checked. (It did cache after that, fwiw).

This was on some Ubuntu LTS. 18.04, maybe? I paved the machine, installed a distro that doesn’t chase the new shiny every six months, and moved on.

Re: Operating Systems Without Systemd

#124

Post by hedora »

microcolonel wrote: post #55
sliken wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly that it WAY more complicated than it needs to be, and it often replaces well written and tested tools with VERY poor implementations. Things like NTP, syslog, DHCPd, cron, iptables, mount, automount, handling /tmp, /dev, DNS, su/sudo, etc. Letting the init system talk to the network before userspace has the ability to setup firewalls gives me the heebie jeebies. Often the implementations of systemd don't handl…

Most of these things are simply untrue. The idea that homed is "incompatible with SSH" is preposterous. > Letting the init system talk to the network before userspace has the ability to setup firewalls gives me the heebie jeebies. Are these just random claims? The init system is userspace , and you can have any service wait for anything to access the network, including disabling the whole network target and triggerin…

Here’s a remote exploit for the systemd DNS client: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/linux.debian.user/2KyNDWMj...

Here’s one for systemd DHCP: https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/10/systemd-is-bad-parsing-an...

Firewalls wouldn’t help with either of these, in fairness.

Re: Operating Systems Without Systemd

#126

Post by hedora »

majewsky wrote: post #111
ta17711771 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My pet-bitch is that it's far too large and convoluted to audit properly for most-sized teams.

As is the Linux kernel.

Yes, but the Linux kernel’s not replacing a few thousand lines of shell script.

Re: Operating Systems Without Systemd

#128

Post by happymellon »

isbjorn16 wrote: post #77
deadbunny wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can output journald to syslog with one config option[1]. 1. https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-jou...

Then it should be on by default. Having to use journalctl instead of reading a plaintext file in /var/log should have resulted in a swift slap upside the noggin the moment it was first considered. I otherwise don't care about systemd, except for the more-than-one locations I might find an init script hiding on my system. It's fine. But don't make me use journalctl just to tail a god damned file like a normal person.…

What I hate is not that it logs to a journal log, it is that the binary db used by journald is non-standard and undocumented.

This means that a dead system can potentially not be read by a live system, as the journal can have undocumented breaking changes.

Re: Operating Systems Without Systemd

#130

Post by ori_b »

majewsky wrote: post #113
ori_b wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cargo culting is the practice of blindly copying a solution without understanding why it makes sense and when it might not apply. You're describing the opposite.

Fictional Debian dev A: "Why do we have /etc/debian-release? Can't we have a release declaration file with a neutral name, like maybe /etc/os-release, in a format that all other distros can adopt?" Fictional Debian dev B: "That's how we've always done it. Plus if we touch it it might break some guy's script." It may not be exactly cargo culting, but at least an adjacent concept.

And that's why we now have BOTH /etc/debian_version AND /etc/os-release. Systemd didn't lead to debian getting rid of the former. So now, not only do you have people writing code that behaves differently (or, more likely, breaks) on different OS versions, it has two different files that it will look at for this.

I wonder how long it'll be before the contents of that file start resembling a user-agent string, complete with "Ubuntu-16.10/Compatible"

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