Comment 2TH3 Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most

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Is it time to fork Debian?

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Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 2, Informative)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-19 18:37 (#2TFW)

I object to the frequently repeated assertion that system admins don't want systemd, and that it only benefits desktop users.

SysVinit scripts don't have any way to restart services that have quit/crashed. That is EXTREMELY important on servers, and it's absence is a notable missing feature on Linux. There are various add-ons that do this, like daemontools, but they can't replace SysVinit, so you're stuck maintaining two mutually incompatible methods for running services.

I don't care about boot-up times, but not being able to have all system services automatically restarted (without human intervention at 3am), should anything happen to them, is a glaring failure on Linux, putting it a couple decades behind its competitors.

Debugging a system, and/or rebooting it every time it comes up but a network file system didn't mount in-time... Getting paged at 3AM every day, because after 2 years of uptime, crond happened to crash and across hundreds of servers that's a daily occurrence... etc. These are all very important to any server admins, and hardly matter to desktop users.

And to preempt the common responses:

You would NOT want to be paged at 3am just because crond crashed after 2 years of uptime. It's crazy to claim someone needs to investigate every such happenstance. It's also crazy to claim you should rewrite all your startup scripts so every system service is run out of daemontools. After all.. ANY service that you need running is "critical" and failure can't be ignored. Right now, these system restarts are typically performed by poorly-paid NOC personnel, who understand less about the services in question than systemd does. And needing to have NOC folks working around the clock is prohibitive for small shops (who have system admins who would like to sleep through the night) and increases the TCO for large shops, who made need a large number of NOC employees because restarting services becomes a full-time job to the exclusion of other job duties, given enough servers.

Automatic service restarts are perfectly safe. If there was any such issue, it would be looming over daemontools since forever, and the widespread adoption of systemd by every distro out there just serves to show the experts just might know something. Those claiming systemd is bad and useless have to come up with vast conspiracy theories to explain away the enthusiastic and widespread adoption.

I hate to jump into the systemd flame war yet again, where typically the least-informed and least affected shout the loudest. After all, there's no benefit to interrupting the detractors, because every distro out there is already on the side of systemd, and the ranting and moaning on sites like this won't change that.

Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 3, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-19 20:29 (#2TG1)

SysVinit scripts don't have any way to restart services that have quit/crashed. That is EXTREMELY important on servers, and it's absence is a notable missing feature on Linux.
When a daemon crashes on a production server, we want to know why. We investigate and fix the problem before restarting.
ANY service that you need running is "critical" and failure can't be ignored. Right now, these system restarts are typically performed by poorly-paid NOC personnel, who understand less about the services in question than systemd does
Funny... the only time I ever needed data center staff to intervene was after a botched systemd "upgrade".
Automatic service restarts are perfectly safe
Simple minded nonsense that will be easily countered by the first 0day exploit that takes advantage of it.

Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-20 14:14 (#2TGV)

What you do when a service fails usually depends on your setup. If its a single Apache server out of 500 thats behind a loadbalancer that can detect the failure and route around, then yeah let it stay dead. If you only have a single webserver, then yeah save the relevant logs, and auto restart that thing pronto.

I think too many people assume that there setup is the best for every situation when discussing systemd. Well, its not. There are a lot of cases where it makes everything much easier, others where it makes things possible, others where it makes little difference.

Most complainers have setups where it makes little difference.

I think everyone who complains about it should join in with uselessd and see that through. That approach makes sense to me. Forking Debian seems like a waste of time and energy.

Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-20 14:32 (#2TGX)

If its a single Apache server out of 500 thats behind a loadbalancer that can detect the failure and route around, then yeah let it stay dead.
Not actually a good plan... If you have 500 instances of Apache, it's because you NEED 500 instances of Apache, and a couple of them going down is likely to cause measurable slowdowns at peak times. If you have many more servers than you need, you're wasting money to compensate for software limitations.
I think everyone who complains about it should join in with uselessd and see that through. That approach makes sense to me. Forking Debian seems like a waste of time and energy.
I think most everyone can agree on that point.

Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-20 17:35 (#2TH3)

You have 500 servers for the same reason you have raid: Redundancy.

Junk Status

Marked as [Not Junk] by bryan@pipedot.org on 2015-01-02 05:35