Count me as a systemd convert

http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9655-count-me-as-a-systemd-convert

by KKKKkkkk1 • 10 years ago

116 137 10 years ago

changelog.complete.org

api• 10 years ago

IMHO sysvinit and systemd both suck in that they're both overly obscure, overly arcane, overly complex, and poorly documented. Systemd replaces a legacy pile of hacks mess with an over-engineered tower of babel mess.

An improvement would be something with modern syntax, sparse features, and good docs.

secstate• 10 years ago

Amen sir. Seems crazy that the tipping point for the OP was being able to require certain services to have come up before others. That seems a fairly elementary aspect of process supervision.

For my money, runit gets the nod for modern syntax, sparse feature ... docs are coming along ;)

exabrial• 10 years ago

My personal opinion is it's Redhat's way of seizing control of the Linux ecosystem... But that's a fringe theory

felixgallo• 10 years ago

hardly fringe -- it's straight out of the unix wars historical playbook. Every unix vendor tried to make their own conflicting systems in order to promote lock-in. Solaris, AIX, DG/UX, SCO, everyone, all the time. That it's taken so long in the Linux space is pretty amazing, but of course that it's happening is super depressing.

AckSyn• 10 years ago

Personally, I'm waiting for Linus Torvalds to make his own init system in the event he's fed up with all the sysvinit and systemd bullshit.

Linux Kernel. Git. $torvaldsinitsystem ?

pmoriarty• 10 years ago

Have you tried runit?[1]

[1] http://smarden.org/runit/

SEJeff2• 10 years ago

On your Linux system, type:

man -k systemd

There is extensive and well written documentation for all aspects of systemd so I'm going to call BS on your post. Also, the syntax is consistent and documented. It is infinitely simpler than sysvinit. Either you're trolling, or know very little about systemd. Note that I'm a fan, but far from an apologist.

ktRolster7• 10 years ago

Here's the documentation for systemd-random-seed: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-ran...

What are the command-line options that are available to that tool? Without looking in the source code.

Note that I'm a fan, but far from an apologist.

An apologist is merely someone who offers a defense of something. It comes from the greek word ἀπολογία, "speaking in defense". Thus you are an apologist, even though you're not dogmatic.

JdeBP9• 10 years ago

There is extensive and well written documentation for all aspects of systemd so I'm going to call BS on your post.

As long as you are prepared for the rest of the world to call BS on what you say here, as well. (-:

It's only "extensive and well written" if one sets the bar for those two quite low, and has very lax standards for doco. Unfortunately, people often do set the bar low in the Linux world. But to those from other worlds the words that come to mind are "acceptable" and "mediocre". As someone else has already mentioned here, and as people have pointed out passim over the years, the expected as the norm quality of doco for the BSD world is noticeably a higher standard than in the Linux world.

But it's not the BSD world alone where the norm is higher. The norm for the commercial Unices is and was higher, too. A case in point:

I wrote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11629824 a little while ago. Checking my recollection, I referred to several manual pages for the rlogin command. The HP-UX and Solaris manual pages for rlogin actually had whole subsections about escape sequences, beginning with the general notion then proceeding to specifics of the various individual sequences. The HP-UX manual even proceeds to discuss how to send the escape character onwards, and how to send escape sequences across a daisy-chain of rlogin sessions -- something that still applies to SSH today.

The Linux rlogin manual has 1 paragraph, doesn't mention that there's actually a general concept behind the specifics that it lists, doesn't discuss how to escape the escape character, and doesn't discuss daisy-chaining.

If you're just about to point to your Linux ssh manual as a counterexample and observe the treatment that it gives escape characters, as good as that of the HP-UX doco, then scroll to the bottom of the page and enjoy the fact that you're reading BSD doco written by BSD people. (-:

ams6110• 10 years ago

http://man.openbsd.org/rcctl

JdeBP9• 10 years ago

Because the BSDs don't agree amongst themselves on how services are configured in /etc/rc.conf , OpenBSD (whose tool this is) being a major outlier, this tool does not interoperate at all well with anything other than OpenBSD.

For those with OpenBSD habits, there is a compatibility shim in the nosh toolset that translates to native nosh mechanisms.

* http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwa...

lomnakkus3• 10 years ago

IMHO sysvinit and systemd both suck in that they're both overly obscure, overly arcane, overly complex, and poorly documented. Systemd replaces a legacy pile of hacks mess with an over-engineered tower of babel mess.

This is an easy criticism to make. What's no so easy is to actually implement what's needed for a modern system and still achieve what you seem to be asking for. Modern systems are unbelievably complex beasts.

An improvement would be something with modern syntax, sparse features, and good docs.

This is getting pretty silly and it just looks like you're reaching for anything to criticize here.

What does "modern syntax" mean and why would it be an improvement on the INI-like syntax of systemd configuration?

What earth does "sparse features" mean? You don't want to support everything that a modern system requires? (Take modern system to mean everything from containerized servers to desktops to laptops to a mobile phone. All places where systemd has its place.)

You don't think systemd has "good docs"? IME Systemd has unbelievably good reference documentation for any type of Free Software (in the Unix style of man pages, no less!).

Perhaps tutorial-like documentation is somewhat lacking, but the "systemd for Administrators"[1] blog series is pretty good IMO. (Though, granted, a bit out of date, perhaps.)

[1] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-1.html

snuxoll3• 10 years ago

Speaking from experience, classic sysvinit was the bane of my existence when trying to deploy Python web applications. Having to use things like supervisor because writing init scripts is such a pain is a hack, nothing more. Writing a 10 line systemd unit file packaged in with the RPM I use to deploy my app is much less of a headache, and I welcome the change - combined with parallel startup I don't have to block nginx from loading while my application loads (or vice-versa).

txutxu2• 10 years ago

When I was a child, I did translate knoppix boot messages, to my mother language, for a local project. In colours.

For me was great and rewarding, a nice learning experience, about livecd's initialization and linux in general at the time.

I don't feel like I could have accomplished the same experience trying to do the same with systemd (with my age and knowledge and resources at the time).

Still more difficult, being a Debian user, where systemd is not in the same shape than RHEL based distros, and documentation is out of sync, or missed in blogs...

What you propose reminds me to openrc or the gentoo dependency based init system.

I Love too the BSD/Slackware/busybox init style (single script init). But I'm a scripting mad.

One of my reasons to live, of and for, opensource, is the ethics and freedom behind it. Other one was being more K.I.S.S. on my system interactions than with MS based products.

I feel capital interests hurts some things very hard to obtain, in voluntary groups of people, using guerrilla warfare, and without any care.

Eventually I've deployed some Debian stable (Jessie) systems with sysvinit this same year, and I'm grateful that people in Debian did that option possible.

I'm not sure if a third, or a new option with modern syntax and sparse features as you say, could be better than the years we've been moving the world using sysvinit or upstart or others... but we, the tech people, seem to like new things!

Totally agree about the docs care, specially when there are distributors involved.

When there are changes in opensource, there should be a lot of more care IMHO than in closed products, and this is not always the case.

Unfortunately people, by brain nature, is driven a lot by media and marketing, two weapons of venture capital techs. And if service providers insert X and media inserts X, people who did never maintain a critical and complex deployments using X and did integrate a lot of things with them, starts talking about the smell of the clouds.

What implementation do you suggest, to reach what you propose? I think is not easy :)

My main feature request could be: reliable and malleable (not easy too).

An improvement would be something with modern syntax, sparse features, and good docs.

Loved your tower of babel mess definition, upvoted just by that comparison.

Have a nice day.

JdeBP9• 10 years ago

I'm not sure if a third, or a new option [...] as you say, could be better than the years we've been moving the world using sysvinit or upstart or others

* 1. System 5 rc

* 2. upstart

* 3. systemd

* 4. "third, new, option"

The "Uselessd Guy" critiqued the thinking that underlies this strange way of counting to three that is being employed here, in http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ .

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11641426 on this very page.

pkaye2• 10 years ago

I have to say that it is super fast to boot up with systemd. Maybe 2-3 seconds to boot to my Ubuntu desktop (excluding bios time.) I do use an SSD however.

nitrogen3• 10 years ago

On embedded devices in the SheevaPlug family, it's a bit slower than the old init, presumably because it's doing a lot more stuff (and the OS is either on slow flash or a slow USB-to-SD card interface). It doesn't seem to scale down to small systems very well. I do like the colors, though.

ashitlerferad3• 10 years ago

systemd has boot profiling functionality, you might want to check out which part is slow.

5ilv3r• 10 years ago

systemd is slow on my embedded devices booting from flash too.

tremon4• 10 years ago

I have a 2-second boot from grub to login with plain-old sysvinit. What's remarkable about systemd? And perhaps more relevant, given that BIOS boot times are still above 10 seconds (and minutes on servers), who cares?

oconnore• 10 years ago

I think the systemd complaints can essentially be reduced to "my init system now knows about cgroups, sockets, dbus, [and other things that didn't used to exist]". I haven't heard anyone offer a replacement that accounts for these features while maintaining "the Unix way".

pdkl952• 10 years ago

None of those feature require systemd.

cgroups

Works fine on my Gentoo (OpenRC) desktop. This meme that systemd is necessary for cgroups is simply incorrect.

sockets

We stopped using xinetd a loooooong time ago. If you want to use a central point of failure, that's your business.

dbus

Isn't necessary in the init process, though you're free to use it if you wish.

didn't used to exist

Such as?

replacement for these features

The replacement in some cases should be "nothing". You're trying to frame the conversation in a way that presumes features like cgroups or "socket activation" are desired features.

The entire point of this "debate" is that you shouldn't be tying extra features to the init process. There are a wide variety of systems in the Linux ecosystem, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

If you want to run a heavyweight, opinionated, monolithic init like systemd, that's fine. If it makes your life easier, that's great. Just remember that other people have different requirements.

dredmorbius6• 10 years ago

Downvote brigades on factually correct posts you happen not to agree with aren't cricket.

tomjakubowski• 10 years ago

"foo knows about X, Y, and Z" doesn't mean the same thing as "foo is required for X, Y, and Z".

> replacement for these features

Did GP edit their comment? The quotes and arguments you're arguing with aren't present in it.

We stopped using xinetd a loooooong time ago. If you want to use a central point of failure, that's your business.

An init system that groks socket activation yields more benefits than just lazy service startup. Services which communicate over a socket can be more loosely coupled, and a service need not be a traditional "forking daemon" for dependent services to start up at the correct time (since , say, the dependency's UNIX domain socket is already created, they can all start in parallel).

edit: I edited the last paragraph in 20 minutes after posting.

vidarh3• 10 years ago

Works fine on my Gentoo (OpenRC) desktop. This meme that systemd is necessary for cgroups is simply incorrect.

That's not what it's about. The point of cgroups integration in systemd is that it allows systemd to precisely track the processes started under it, which means that e.g. applications where things like double-forking or similar happens can still be completely stopped by systemd even if the parent process des.

You're trying to frame the conversation in a way that presumes features like cgroups or "socket activation" are desired features.

They are to me. They massively improves things vs. sysvinit.

The entire point of this "debate" is that you shouldn't be tying extra features to the init process.

The entire starting point for systemd is that traditional sysvinit is woefully lacking in the functionality required to build reliable systems. And when you start trying to cobble together something on top of it, it quickly becomes clear that it is not easy.

E.g. try to build a reliable process manager outside of pid 1. You still need process restarting functionality in pid 1 for when your process manager dies. What if it fails to restart? How are you going to log those failures reliably? You end up duplicating a lot of functionality of a process manager in pid 1 if you want a reliable system even if you run a separate process manager outside of pid 1.

There are parts of the systemd design I don't agree with, and I think they'd benefit from splitting out various components from the project, not least for "political" reasons. But the design for the core parts of systemd-the-init-system largely follow on from a very limited set of core requirements of being able to reliably start, stop and keep services running and reliably log data from them.

These are requirements that sysvinit basically throws it hands up at and says "not my table", while by owning pid 1 they make it basically impossible to meet them.

dredmorbius6• 10 years ago

Speaking for your opposition whilst misrepresenting their arguments is very dirty pool.

There are numerous long-term expert users and developers of Linux who've spoken against systemd, its design, its behavior, and its developers. Including Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Ted T'so, and Patrick Volkerding

(That's the original developer of Linux, the long-time second in command, the lead filesystem developer, and the Slackware distro's maintainer -- the oldest extant linux distro.)

Mark Shuttleworth, Eric Raymond, and Ian Jackson are notable other critics.

For actual arguments against systemd:

http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_...

https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and...

The laptop vs server divide:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2837182/linux/back-into-lin...

Bad design and bad attitude. One or the other might be survivable. Both are likely not.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2608798/data-center/systemd...

Uselessd's observations on misrepresentations by systemd advocates:

http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/

Five troubles:

http://www.draketo.de/light/english/top-5-systemd-troubles

LWN on Debian's debates: https://lwn.net/Articles/452865/

Wikipedia on Systemd's controversy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History_and_controve...

jackyb2• 10 years ago

Could you point to where Linus said he doesn't like the design of systemd? AFAIK he's only disliked the binary logging (perhaps among a few other small things) but he liked it overall.

asiekierka• 10 years ago

One of the bigger arguments is also "it only works on Linux, what about BSDs, OS X, etc.?"

JdeBP9• 10 years ago

... which is food for thought for the Ubuntu world, now it has Ubuntu on BSD and Ubuntu on Windows NT in addition to Ubuntu on Linux.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11415985

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416376

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326457

jabl2• 10 years ago

One of the bigger arguments is also "it only works on Linux, what about BSDs, OS X, etc.?"

In what way is that a "big argument"? BSD has their own rc-thing (not sysv init), OS X has launchd (not sysv init, shares many similarities with systemd actually, such as socket activation), Solaris has SMF (again, not sysv init), etc.

Apart from a bunch of non-mainstream Linux distros sticking with sysv init, who else is actually using it?

combatentropy2• 10 years ago

The choice isn't binary: sysvinit or systemd. There is a third way. I'm not much of a sysadmin, but I'm intrigued when I read of daemontools and its ilk.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/dae...

http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/

ashitlerferad3• 10 years ago

There are many more than 3 init systems. There are tens of them.

combatentropy2• 10 years ago

I meant three families, but you still may be right.

vocatus_gate• 10 years ago

There are dozens of us!!

beagle3• 10 years ago

There's also http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwar... - a daemontools compatible, partially-systemd compatible init system.

toomanythings22• 10 years ago

I still have serious misgivings

I guess that kinda tells us more than anything else he said.

kl4m• 10 years ago

You cut the quote to change the meaning.

"Although I still have serious misgivings about the systemd upstream’s attitude, I’ve got to say I find the system rather refreshing and useful in practice."

toomanythings22• 10 years ago

There are misgivings none-the-less. A new system being "refreshing" is not a reason to use it. "Useful" is hardly a ringing endorsement.

What disturbs me the most is that systemd takes Linux farther away from being a Unix-like system. Linux is now "Linux" and incompatible with anything else.

bbayles• 10 years ago

I didn't really know anything about init systems until 2014 (so I all but missed the systemd wars) when I found myself in need of process synchronization and supervision on various platforms.

My task was pretty straightforward: I had a group of processes that need to start in a certain order, restart if they die, run as a non-root user, and write logs somewhere. I needed to support RHEL 5, 6, and 7, which all use different init systems (sysvinit, upstart, and systemd). I worked with all of them and also experimented with alternatives (runit, s6, Supervisor).

For my task systemd was a pleasure to work with compared to the others. There was a bit of a learning curve, but once I mapped out what I needed to do the solution was obvious.

I found upstart to be almost good, but the version that ships with RHEL 6 is lacking compared to the later versions that came with Ubuntu. The Python-based Supervisor was surprisingly good. I sort of saw why some people might like s6, but runit's charm was lost on me.

sysvinit was by far the worst. I wound up using sysvinit to hand off to Supervisor in order to not spend my life worrying about the number of forks and pidfile locations.

I can't speak to systemd's shortcomings and perceived hegemony in other areas, but when it comes to acting like an init system it is miles ahead of everything else.

nickysielicki5• 10 years ago

This is maybe pedantic, but something that irks me about systemd is the way that systemctl commands are composed.

I find myself doing this frequently

systemctl status someservice
systemctl stop someservice
systemctl edit someservice
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start someservice
systemctl status someservice
systemctl enable someservice

Why make the operation the middle parameter? I understand that "systemctl start foo" more closely resembles the English sentence, "SystemD, please start the foo service", but I couldn't give two shits about that, and it's a dumb design decision. Any time that I am entering a systemctl command, I'm probably entering a series of 3 or more of them, and they're probably all related to the same service.

Instead of being able to press <Up Arrow>, <C-Backspace>, and type my operation, I'm instead having to position my cursor to the second argument. It's a mess!

chm• 10 years ago

In Debian I use "service X action" which I also find preferable for the exact same reason you mention.

dredmorbius6• 10 years ago

One-liner lists are handy:

    for service in <list> do; systemctl <action> <service>; done

E.g.,

    for system in foo bar baz; do systemctl stop $system; systemctl start $system; done

... will stop and start each of your named services.

(This clearly extends far beyond systemd.)

hueving2• 10 years ago

But it accepts a list, so rather than write the loop:

systemctl stop foo bar baz; systemctl start foo bar baz

striking2• 10 years ago

Because it's the pattern far more Unix tools use. Command name, then flags, then a file/set of files.

I felt exactly the opposite way when I used Debian (not for any justifiable reason other than "that's not the way it's supposed to beeeee") because Debian does it in the way you describe.

Theoretically, you could put on your hacker gloves and write a script that shifts the arguments for you. That might be a fun exercise!

mjevans• 10 years ago

So that it's easier to bring up/down a number of related service units with single actions.

Example: systemctl stop smbd nmbd ; systemctl start smbd nmbd

It isn't that the operation is the /middle/ parameter, it's that you have invocation action //LIST//

nickysielicki5• 10 years ago

The point of OP's link is that the novelty of systemd is that you can compose chains of dependencies and how that saves time and effort.

So why should it be a common operation for the enduser to start and stop a list of related services? Instead of having to type and remember them individually, I should add a BindTo line in my service files and let systemd handle it. It's like the frontend for systemd is optimizing for a situation that it is supposed to prevent.

And anyway, there's no unixy reason the variadic argument couldn't be in the middle. cp, for example, has

    <command name> <options> <variadic list of files to copy> <single dir to copy to>

nostalgiac2• 10 years ago

That wouldn't really make sense at all.

Can you name any commands or interfaces that take the variable before the argument?

nickysielicki5• 10 years ago

/etc/init.d/<variable> <command>

dredmorbius6• 10 years ago

Depending on what you're looking for, grep may or may not.

    grep <pattern> <file>

Convenient when you're looking for <pattern> in a bunch of <file> (and for some reason cannot glob or list them). Less so if you're looking for a bunch of <pattern> in some one <file>.

I've been known to write one-liner shell functions to put the variable component of a list of commands at the end of the commandline for easy editing.

vacri2• 10 years ago

cp, rm, rsync, scp tar...

    cp [list of a great many items] [here]

or service

    service [item] [action]

whereas systemd is

    systemctl [action] [list of great many items]

There appears to be no hard and fast rule, though - argument ordering is different to flag ordering (-f -z etc). I never see anyone put flags at the end, though plenty of tools work fine that way.

My problem with systemctl is that it's so woeful to tab-complete. At 'syst[TAB]c[TAB]', you may as well just type out the whole thing, because tabbing only saves you two characters. Why not just take 'ctl', that doesn't seem to be taken by anyone?

poooogles• 10 years ago

Try doing ^status^stop for instance moving between the first and second command.

waterhouse• 10 years ago

By the way, are you aware of the keypresses that move the cursor by a word at a time? In particular, <M-Left Arrow> and <M-B> should each move backward by a word. You should be able to go <Up Arrow> <M-Left Arrow> <C-W> [type operation] <Space> <Return>. You might have to enable alt as meta key on an OS X terminal (which is obviously not the case here), or disable alt as referring to file menus on Linux (which may be the case here). Prefixing a command with ESC also works as a meta key, though I'd find it ergonomically intolerable.

xamolxix• 10 years ago

I use:

"systemctl stop foo" then "stop^start"

Which will substitute stop with start in the previous command (in bash, not sure about other shells)

lottin• 10 years ago

It's not a big deal, since all modern shells have move commands (e.g. "shell-backward-word" in bash) that allow you to jump to the second-to-last argument with a simple key stroke.

pbhjpbhj• 10 years ago

What's the default keystroke for bash/dash?

bigbugbag3• 10 years ago

It seems you are using bash and need to up your shell game, allow to suggest zsh which allow for thing such as:

!!:s/status/stop/

This will recall the last command and substitute status with stop.

!-2:s/status/edit/

Will recall two commands back from history and substitute status with edit.

See http://reasoniamhere.com/2014/01/11/outrageously-useful-tips...

For added awesomeness have a look into history-substring-search[1], zsh-autosuggestions[2], zsh-syntax-highlighting[3].

[1] https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search [2]: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions [3]: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting

aexaey• 10 years ago

Instead of being able to press <Up Arrow>, <C-Backspace>, and type my operation, I'm instead having to position my cursor to the second argument.

Maybe not as neatly, but you can do this in 5 blind keystrokes (instead of 3):

    Up; Alt-<b; b; Backspace>

nickysielicki5• 10 years ago

Thanks for the tip, I didn't know about alt-<b>.

I should try using emacs for a month, if only for the sake of getting to know readline better.

digi_owl8• 10 years ago

One "interesting" tidbit about systemd is that the init part will keel over if dbus goes down, and if pid1 keels over you are looking at a kernel panic...

kinkdr• 10 years ago

I was bitten by this once. A typo in dbus configuration rendered my machine unbootable.

ZenoArrow2• 10 years ago

I wonder if issues like this were part of the reason the release of kdbus (dbus as a kernel module) was delayed.

digi_owl8• 10 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11639659

Found this regarding programming languages (and JS in particular) a bit interesting in the middle of the whole systemd debate, as i wonder if it can be applied to unix as well.

This in that unix have from the early days been made up of loosely coupled parts. This then allowed new parts to be introduced, tested, and either adopted widely or discarded as seen fit. Maybe even adopted in some areas but ignored in others. But you rarely ran into deep dependency chains.

Systemd on the other hand is tightly coupled, continually sprouting new stuff, and foisted on the world via deep dependencies.

creshal• 10 years ago

Systemd on the other hand is tightly coupled

Not really. All its various components are loosely coupled over DBus, and most are entirely optional. There's no technical reason why people can't e.g. implement journald's API in syslog. Or replace the various userspace *ctls (timedatectl, hostnamectl, …), or reimplement logind on top of some BSD (already done, actually), …

digi_owl8• 10 years ago

You seem to be confusing the interface between systemd components and third parties, with internal interfaces.

The latter are expressly non-documented, and non-stable, to allow the systemd devs to change them as they see fit.

As for logind on BSD, got a link? Last i recall they were struggling because it was a sprawling and moving target (Consolekit2 is also having that problem). One example is that recently logind took over much fo the job upower used to do, with upower now being a compatibility wrapper around logind.

Oh btw, dbus is massively more opaque that being able to run a command, look at the output, and then pipe that to another with the proper flags and such.

TheyW0ntL1sten4• 10 years ago

Dude, there's literally nothing you can say that will change people's mind on this subject. It has long since crossed into some kind of identity subject.

JdeBP9• 10 years ago

reimplement logind on top of some BSD (already done, actually)

If you're thinking of SystemBSD, you are incorrect. There has been no publicly visible change on that front in the past year.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10176275

* http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/de...

B1FF_PSUVM• 10 years ago

I was debugging the boot on a server recently. It mounts a bunch of NFS filesystems

Don't do that. It's a bag of hurt.

(Still sore about the hours that workstations with not-working-fs mounts spent waiting for each other on boot after power failures, ages ago. Nevermore.)

ibotty2• 10 years ago

So you just don't use remote filesystems? That's a solution!

Honestly, whenever the init system is configured correctly, you don't run into these problems all ops know a story about. It helps that systemd makes it easier to configure dependencies so that only the units depending on remote fs stall when it is unavailable.

TheyW0ntL1sten4• 10 years ago

One time I was writing this long story in a text editor that crashed so I stopped writing. Nevermore.

jabl2• 10 years ago

So you just don't use remote filesystems? That's a solution!

No, you mount them with autofs, of course.

Count me as a systemd convert

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