Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

naftuli.wtf

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 272 posts

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#131

Post by yAnonymous »

XorNot wrote: post #119
ajross wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. You get used to journalctl awfully quickly. For someone who never uses it, it's going to have some friction. You need to remember the command and how to spell it, which I'll admit isn't trivial compared to "just dig around in /var/log" style we're all used to. But you get over that hump in an hour. For the straightforward "?!$! something happened just grep for it in the log file" it's no harder or slower. And yo…

journalctl -u is an amazing improvement on dealing with logs. You get the immediate output of exactly what service you're interested in.

That's nice, but adding it to the old log system is a one-liner, so it's hardly a reason to use Systemd.

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#132

Post by nvarsj »

astrodust wrote: post #72
alyandon wrote: post #56

At first I didn't care much for the idea of having to learn yet another init system but as I had to write ansible automation stuff for services on Centos 7 it was kind of required that I have some basic understanding of systemd. I have to say now that I'm more familiar with it it has begun to grow on me. There is something subjectively nice to me about running systemctl status and seeing a nice, clear picture of what…

The idea of systemd isn't bad. What's annoying is the friction involved in using it. It's just a shade too ornate, a little too magical, in both cases only by a small degree, but it's an important one. Creating a workable systemd init script is actually pleasant. Getting it running is easy. Checking for errors with status is nice, but searching the logs is annoying. pm2 ( https://github.com/Unitech/pm2 ) has a neat f…

I'm not sure how you could write this with a straight face. Systemd has friction, but writing init scripts doesn't? Are you kidding me? Have you ever had to write init scripts for production servers? Writing systemd unit files is entirely more straightforward and simple than any init script hackery. And how is "journalctl -u sshd -f" not straightforward? Systemd has its issues sure, but your comment is pure FUD.

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#133

Post by dijit »

ashark wrote: post #24
FeepingCreature wrote: post #14

I'd probably respect SystemD a lot more if it measured itself against a modern init system like Gentoo's OpenRC instead of pretending it's invented dependency handling. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Comparison_of_init_systems > OpenRC provides a number of features touted as innovative by recent init systems like systemd ...

OpenRC's the only init system I've actually liked . It's one of the things I really miss from when I used Gentoo, and I don't know why more distros didn't adopt it years ago.

You should check out SMF, if you have a couple of hours to play with Solaris.. it handles things that systemd does (socket activation, process management/watching etc;) but in an orthogonal way that makes sense.

I like openrc, I also like runit (for different reasons) but SMF is the gold standard for me and I recommend more people check it out. Even if it has XML elements :(

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#134

Post by dijit »

nvarsj wrote: post #132
astrodust wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of systemd isn't bad. What's annoying is the friction involved in using it. It's just a shade too ornate, a little too magical, in both cases only by a small degree, but it's an important one. Creating a workable systemd init script is actually pleasant. Getting it running is easy. Checking for errors with status is nice, but searching the logs is annoying. pm2 ( https://github.com/Unitech/pm2 ) has a neat f…

I'm not sure how you could write this with a straight face. Systemd has friction, but writing init scripts doesn't? Are you kidding me? Have you ever had to write init scripts for production servers? Writing systemd unit files is entirely more straightforward and simple than any init script hackery. And how is "journalctl -u sshd -f" not straightforward? Systemd has its issues sure, but your comment is pure FUD.

Writing init scripts is as hard as you want it to be.

and 99% of sysadmins are not writing their own, they're modifying the ones supplied by distro maintainers.

If you're a distro maintainer then init scripts are something you write, something you understand because you're handling the state of your distribution from them.

Of course you can just abstract away all the code to another bash script and have your init as 2 lines (which is what openBSD actually does).

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#135

Post by tannhaeuser »

Best thing of systemd is that it's putting people behind alternate systemd-free Linuxen. Devuan, Alpine, Gentoo, Void (and particularly the BSDs) come along nicely.

I can tolerate systemd on desktops as long as I don't have to deal with it. The moment it craps out with Java-esque error traces in binary logs I'll install Slackware (or is there a modern desktop Linux without systemd I'm not aware of?).

Other than for desktops with complex run-time dependencies (WLAN, USB devices, login sessions), what are the benefits of systemd for servers that warrant a massive, polarizing, tasteless monolith which puts you up for endless patches and reboots, especially in a container world? (Re-)starting and stopping a daemon isn't rocket science; it's like 10 lines of shell code.

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#136

Post by dijit »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #135

Best thing of systemd is that it's putting people behind alternate systemd-free Linuxen. Devuan, Alpine, Gentoo, Void (and particularly the BSDs) come along nicely. I can tolerate systemd on desktops as long as I don't have to deal with it. The moment it craps out with Java-esque error traces in binary logs I'll install Slackware (or is there a modern desktop Linux without systemd I'm not aware of?). Other than for d…

SystemD was so polarizing for me, I was a Fedora user and RHEL user for work- but it started consuming everything and giving really bizarre issues... I tried reaching out and explaining to people that it wasn't working in the way I expected or, asking them to point me towards the docs so I can at least learn how to use journalling properly so it doesn't hide issues from me.. and was met with some hostility.

When I asked to disable binary logging entirely because it kept getting corrupted and was opaque I was met with "Unlearn your old ways old man"-style responses and "You can just log to rsyslog too".. No, I want it disabled.. I don't have a desire to log twice..

It was then I realised I was at the mercy of systemd, they can push whatever and reject whatever and I'm completely out of control- I cannot introspect their service manager effectively, it's non-deterministic. It just reeks of hubris from the maintainers. It does mostly the right thing for most people, and they compare it to sysvinit which admittedly needed love. (and, was not a process manager, was only a process starter).

So, I adopted *BSD on the server. And christ is it wonderful.

I still use Arch/SystemD on my desktop at home, because it's actually pretty useful on laptops/desktops. But I swore a vow never to manage a server with SystemD on it.

I'm still runing RHEL6 at work, for the next OS, I'm pushing my very large corp to adopt FreeBSD as an alternative. That's a fairly large amount of money that Red Hat will lose and I don't particularly feel bad about it.

They forced my hand.

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#137

Post by nailer »

Does systemd have a network protocol like syslog, i.e. is there a native way to send logs for a particular unit/service to a remote machine?

Everything I find just says to install syslog, which surprises me.

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#139

Post by pjc50 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #10

I feel like at some point, news aggregation sites will need moratoriums on this topic. Systemd is an architectural decision with very philosophical effects, so by its very nature be very divisive. I'm, personally, not a fan at all of systemd, but am tired of seeing these stupid arguments everywhere all the time. There are plenty of places to find competent summaries of both the technical and political arguments for a…

If a forum can't handle a discussion of UNIX software, then it should probably stick to kitten gifs. The art of moderation and community management is to allow discussion while containing hostility.

Personally I feel that the sheer controversialness of systemd and its chief maintainer is a bug in and of itself, which the maintainers should address.

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#140

Post by pmlnr »

krylon wrote: post #117

At the risk of sounding heretical, I kind of find myself in the middle ground regarding systemd - I was initially highly skeptical of it, and I still think it's problematic that it is so Linux-centric and will cause problems maintaining software to run both on Linux/systemd and on *BSD. The way it was pushed on distros was problematic, in my opinion. But having used a couple of Linux systems running systemd - Raspian…

> I had no problems with it.

You're lucky. For me, systemd randomly fails to execute a reboot, then, because of this, fails to do halt, and I have to force power off the machine.

And this is just one.

Post reply on HN