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 doesFunny... the only time I ever needed data center staff to intervene was after a botched systemd "upgrade".Automatic service restarts are perfectly safeSimple 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: 2, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-19 23:15 (#2TG5) When a daemon crashes on a production server, we want to know why. We investigate and fix the problem before restarting.Already addressed this nonsense, TWICE, in my post. Try again.Funny... the only time I ever needed data center staff to intervene was after a botched systemd "upgrade".A NOC isn't datacenter staff. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-20 00:15 (#2TG7) No, but a NOC is the sysadmins' software "Hands and Eyes". If they're too stupid to do the work necessary, maybe you should pay them more?If something is crashing on a production server you have fucked up. The end. Production isn't for testing, it's for stable code. The only exemption is if your production network is *so* big that it allows you to segment parts of it for testing, in which case you're accepting that things might break, so you can't really complain about being woken up at 3am to fix a broken service. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 3, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-20 00:21 (#2TG8) If something is crashing on a production server you have fucked upUtter nonsense. You're just a kid with a linux box who has no large-scale experience but wants to pretend to be an expert on the internet. EVERYTHING crashes over a long enough time-frame. The most uber-stable and basic simple system software will eventually crash. Across enough servers, you'll see it happening daily. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-20 14:20 (#2TGW) Ironically impolite, given your other comments here.In any case, are you saying that a process should restart whenever it fails, for whatever reason? A server can go down for a lot of reasons, anything from a dead harddrive to a CPU overheating because the heatsink got dirty. Or even more "weird" reasons like cosmic rays, in fact, I bet that a large enough cluster of servers could work reasonably well as a cosmic ray detector, just watch for ECC errors in RAM. If you're getting crashed processes because of hardware errors you can't just restart the process. You need to fix the hardware error, which is probably a long, drawn out process since you need to get someone on site first.If on the other hand your processes are crashing because of stupid stuff, like you forgot to rotate logs, or you've got a memory leak, or some software-only issue, then you're kind of an idiot for letting that get to a production server. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 2, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-20 14:45 (#2TGY) Ironically impolite, given your other comments here.Just calling it like I see it. A spade is still a spade.If you're getting crashed processes because of hardware errors you can't just restart the process.A service crashing isn't evidence of a hardware error, and when that does happen, trying to restart it a couple times won't hurt your efforts in any way.Services will and do crash for no reason... All kinds of strange timing issues will suddenly cause services like crond to just quit after a few hundred days of operation, and continue to work perfectly after being restarted. Go ask someone running a compute cluster how much time they put into investigating every single service crash on their hundreds of thousands of servers... Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1) by fnj@pipedot.org on 2014-10-21 04:39 (#2THR) Services will and do crash for no reasonAppeal to magic? I think if you give the matter even a tiny bit more thought you will agree that it is never "no reason". It may be an extreme low-runner software bug or a hardware glitch, but those are reasons. We may not always be able to figure out the reason, but it is always there. Heck, even an alpha particle in a memory cell is not "no reason:.
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 doesFunny... the only time I ever needed data center staff to intervene was after a botched systemd "upgrade".Automatic service restarts are perfectly safeSimple 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: 2, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-19 23:15 (#2TG5) When a daemon crashes on a production server, we want to know why. We investigate and fix the problem before restarting.Already addressed this nonsense, TWICE, in my post. Try again.Funny... the only time I ever needed data center staff to intervene was after a botched systemd "upgrade".A NOC isn't datacenter staff. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-20 00:15 (#2TG7) No, but a NOC is the sysadmins' software "Hands and Eyes". If they're too stupid to do the work necessary, maybe you should pay them more?If something is crashing on a production server you have fucked up. The end. Production isn't for testing, it's for stable code. The only exemption is if your production network is *so* big that it allows you to segment parts of it for testing, in which case you're accepting that things might break, so you can't really complain about being woken up at 3am to fix a broken service. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 3, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-20 00:21 (#2TG8) If something is crashing on a production server you have fucked upUtter nonsense. You're just a kid with a linux box who has no large-scale experience but wants to pretend to be an expert on the internet. EVERYTHING crashes over a long enough time-frame. The most uber-stable and basic simple system software will eventually crash. Across enough servers, you'll see it happening daily. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-20 14:20 (#2TGW) Ironically impolite, given your other comments here.In any case, are you saying that a process should restart whenever it fails, for whatever reason? A server can go down for a lot of reasons, anything from a dead harddrive to a CPU overheating because the heatsink got dirty. Or even more "weird" reasons like cosmic rays, in fact, I bet that a large enough cluster of servers could work reasonably well as a cosmic ray detector, just watch for ECC errors in RAM. If you're getting crashed processes because of hardware errors you can't just restart the process. You need to fix the hardware error, which is probably a long, drawn out process since you need to get someone on site first.If on the other hand your processes are crashing because of stupid stuff, like you forgot to rotate logs, or you've got a memory leak, or some software-only issue, then you're kind of an idiot for letting that get to a production server. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 2, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-20 14:45 (#2TGY) Ironically impolite, given your other comments here.Just calling it like I see it. A spade is still a spade.If you're getting crashed processes because of hardware errors you can't just restart the process.A service crashing isn't evidence of a hardware error, and when that does happen, trying to restart it a couple times won't hurt your efforts in any way.Services will and do crash for no reason... All kinds of strange timing issues will suddenly cause services like crond to just quit after a few hundred days of operation, and continue to work perfectly after being restarted. Go ask someone running a compute cluster how much time they put into investigating every single service crash on their hundreds of thousands of servers... Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1) by fnj@pipedot.org on 2014-10-21 04:39 (#2THR) Services will and do crash for no reasonAppeal to magic? I think if you give the matter even a tiny bit more thought you will agree that it is never "no reason". It may be an extreme low-runner software bug or a hardware glitch, but those are reasons. We may not always be able to figure out the reason, but it is always there. Heck, even an alpha particle in a memory cell is not "no reason:.
Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 2, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-19 23:15 (#2TG5) When a daemon crashes on a production server, we want to know why. We investigate and fix the problem before restarting.Already addressed this nonsense, TWICE, in my post. Try again.Funny... the only time I ever needed data center staff to intervene was after a botched systemd "upgrade".A NOC isn't datacenter staff. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-20 00:15 (#2TG7) No, but a NOC is the sysadmins' software "Hands and Eyes". If they're too stupid to do the work necessary, maybe you should pay them more?If something is crashing on a production server you have fucked up. The end. Production isn't for testing, it's for stable code. The only exemption is if your production network is *so* big that it allows you to segment parts of it for testing, in which case you're accepting that things might break, so you can't really complain about being woken up at 3am to fix a broken service. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 3, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-20 00:21 (#2TG8) If something is crashing on a production server you have fucked upUtter nonsense. You're just a kid with a linux box who has no large-scale experience but wants to pretend to be an expert on the internet. EVERYTHING crashes over a long enough time-frame. The most uber-stable and basic simple system software will eventually crash. Across enough servers, you'll see it happening daily. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-20 14:20 (#2TGW) Ironically impolite, given your other comments here.In any case, are you saying that a process should restart whenever it fails, for whatever reason? A server can go down for a lot of reasons, anything from a dead harddrive to a CPU overheating because the heatsink got dirty. Or even more "weird" reasons like cosmic rays, in fact, I bet that a large enough cluster of servers could work reasonably well as a cosmic ray detector, just watch for ECC errors in RAM. If you're getting crashed processes because of hardware errors you can't just restart the process. You need to fix the hardware error, which is probably a long, drawn out process since you need to get someone on site first.If on the other hand your processes are crashing because of stupid stuff, like you forgot to rotate logs, or you've got a memory leak, or some software-only issue, then you're kind of an idiot for letting that get to a production server. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 2, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-20 14:45 (#2TGY) Ironically impolite, given your other comments here.Just calling it like I see it. A spade is still a spade.If you're getting crashed processes because of hardware errors you can't just restart the process.A service crashing isn't evidence of a hardware error, and when that does happen, trying to restart it a couple times won't hurt your efforts in any way.Services will and do crash for no reason... All kinds of strange timing issues will suddenly cause services like crond to just quit after a few hundred days of operation, and continue to work perfectly after being restarted. Go ask someone running a compute cluster how much time they put into investigating every single service crash on their hundreds of thousands of servers... Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1) by fnj@pipedot.org on 2014-10-21 04:39 (#2THR) Services will and do crash for no reasonAppeal to magic? I think if you give the matter even a tiny bit more thought you will agree that it is never "no reason". It may be an extreme low-runner software bug or a hardware glitch, but those are reasons. We may not always be able to figure out the reason, but it is always there. Heck, even an alpha particle in a memory cell is not "no reason:.
Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-20 00:15 (#2TG7) No, but a NOC is the sysadmins' software "Hands and Eyes". If they're too stupid to do the work necessary, maybe you should pay them more?If something is crashing on a production server you have fucked up. The end. Production isn't for testing, it's for stable code. The only exemption is if your production network is *so* big that it allows you to segment parts of it for testing, in which case you're accepting that things might break, so you can't really complain about being woken up at 3am to fix a broken service. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 3, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-20 00:21 (#2TG8) If something is crashing on a production server you have fucked upUtter nonsense. You're just a kid with a linux box who has no large-scale experience but wants to pretend to be an expert on the internet. EVERYTHING crashes over a long enough time-frame. The most uber-stable and basic simple system software will eventually crash. Across enough servers, you'll see it happening daily. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-20 14:20 (#2TGW) Ironically impolite, given your other comments here.In any case, are you saying that a process should restart whenever it fails, for whatever reason? A server can go down for a lot of reasons, anything from a dead harddrive to a CPU overheating because the heatsink got dirty. Or even more "weird" reasons like cosmic rays, in fact, I bet that a large enough cluster of servers could work reasonably well as a cosmic ray detector, just watch for ECC errors in RAM. If you're getting crashed processes because of hardware errors you can't just restart the process. You need to fix the hardware error, which is probably a long, drawn out process since you need to get someone on site first.If on the other hand your processes are crashing because of stupid stuff, like you forgot to rotate logs, or you've got a memory leak, or some software-only issue, then you're kind of an idiot for letting that get to a production server. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 2, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-20 14:45 (#2TGY) Ironically impolite, given your other comments here.Just calling it like I see it. A spade is still a spade.If you're getting crashed processes because of hardware errors you can't just restart the process.A service crashing isn't evidence of a hardware error, and when that does happen, trying to restart it a couple times won't hurt your efforts in any way.Services will and do crash for no reason... All kinds of strange timing issues will suddenly cause services like crond to just quit after a few hundred days of operation, and continue to work perfectly after being restarted. Go ask someone running a compute cluster how much time they put into investigating every single service crash on their hundreds of thousands of servers... Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1) by fnj@pipedot.org on 2014-10-21 04:39 (#2THR) Services will and do crash for no reasonAppeal to magic? I think if you give the matter even a tiny bit more thought you will agree that it is never "no reason". It may be an extreme low-runner software bug or a hardware glitch, but those are reasons. We may not always be able to figure out the reason, but it is always there. Heck, even an alpha particle in a memory cell is not "no reason:.
Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 3, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-20 00:21 (#2TG8) If something is crashing on a production server you have fucked upUtter nonsense. You're just a kid with a linux box who has no large-scale experience but wants to pretend to be an expert on the internet. EVERYTHING crashes over a long enough time-frame. The most uber-stable and basic simple system software will eventually crash. Across enough servers, you'll see it happening daily. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-20 14:20 (#2TGW) Ironically impolite, given your other comments here.In any case, are you saying that a process should restart whenever it fails, for whatever reason? A server can go down for a lot of reasons, anything from a dead harddrive to a CPU overheating because the heatsink got dirty. Or even more "weird" reasons like cosmic rays, in fact, I bet that a large enough cluster of servers could work reasonably well as a cosmic ray detector, just watch for ECC errors in RAM. If you're getting crashed processes because of hardware errors you can't just restart the process. You need to fix the hardware error, which is probably a long, drawn out process since you need to get someone on site first.If on the other hand your processes are crashing because of stupid stuff, like you forgot to rotate logs, or you've got a memory leak, or some software-only issue, then you're kind of an idiot for letting that get to a production server. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 2, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-20 14:45 (#2TGY) Ironically impolite, given your other comments here.Just calling it like I see it. A spade is still a spade.If you're getting crashed processes because of hardware errors you can't just restart the process.A service crashing isn't evidence of a hardware error, and when that does happen, trying to restart it a couple times won't hurt your efforts in any way.Services will and do crash for no reason... All kinds of strange timing issues will suddenly cause services like crond to just quit after a few hundred days of operation, and continue to work perfectly after being restarted. Go ask someone running a compute cluster how much time they put into investigating every single service crash on their hundreds of thousands of servers... Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1) by fnj@pipedot.org on 2014-10-21 04:39 (#2THR) Services will and do crash for no reasonAppeal to magic? I think if you give the matter even a tiny bit more thought you will agree that it is never "no reason". It may be an extreme low-runner software bug or a hardware glitch, but those are reasons. We may not always be able to figure out the reason, but it is always there. Heck, even an alpha particle in a memory cell is not "no reason:.
Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-20 14:20 (#2TGW) Ironically impolite, given your other comments here.In any case, are you saying that a process should restart whenever it fails, for whatever reason? A server can go down for a lot of reasons, anything from a dead harddrive to a CPU overheating because the heatsink got dirty. Or even more "weird" reasons like cosmic rays, in fact, I bet that a large enough cluster of servers could work reasonably well as a cosmic ray detector, just watch for ECC errors in RAM. If you're getting crashed processes because of hardware errors you can't just restart the process. You need to fix the hardware error, which is probably a long, drawn out process since you need to get someone on site first.If on the other hand your processes are crashing because of stupid stuff, like you forgot to rotate logs, or you've got a memory leak, or some software-only issue, then you're kind of an idiot for letting that get to a production server. Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 2, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-20 14:45 (#2TGY) Ironically impolite, given your other comments here.Just calling it like I see it. A spade is still a spade.If you're getting crashed processes because of hardware errors you can't just restart the process.A service crashing isn't evidence of a hardware error, and when that does happen, trying to restart it a couple times won't hurt your efforts in any way.Services will and do crash for no reason... All kinds of strange timing issues will suddenly cause services like crond to just quit after a few hundred days of operation, and continue to work perfectly after being restarted. Go ask someone running a compute cluster how much time they put into investigating every single service crash on their hundreds of thousands of servers... Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1) by fnj@pipedot.org on 2014-10-21 04:39 (#2THR) Services will and do crash for no reasonAppeal to magic? I think if you give the matter even a tiny bit more thought you will agree that it is never "no reason". It may be an extreme low-runner software bug or a hardware glitch, but those are reasons. We may not always be able to figure out the reason, but it is always there. Heck, even an alpha particle in a memory cell is not "no reason:.
Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 2, Insightful) by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-20 14:45 (#2TGY) Ironically impolite, given your other comments here.Just calling it like I see it. A spade is still a spade.If you're getting crashed processes because of hardware errors you can't just restart the process.A service crashing isn't evidence of a hardware error, and when that does happen, trying to restart it a couple times won't hurt your efforts in any way.Services will and do crash for no reason... All kinds of strange timing issues will suddenly cause services like crond to just quit after a few hundred days of operation, and continue to work perfectly after being restarted. Go ask someone running a compute cluster how much time they put into investigating every single service crash on their hundreds of thousands of servers... Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1) by fnj@pipedot.org on 2014-10-21 04:39 (#2THR) Services will and do crash for no reasonAppeal to magic? I think if you give the matter even a tiny bit more thought you will agree that it is never "no reason". It may be an extreme low-runner software bug or a hardware glitch, but those are reasons. We may not always be able to figure out the reason, but it is always there. Heck, even an alpha particle in a memory cell is not "no reason:.
Re: Benefits servers and system admins the most (Score: 1) by fnj@pipedot.org on 2014-10-21 04:39 (#2THR) Services will and do crash for no reasonAppeal to magic? I think if you give the matter even a tiny bit more thought you will agree that it is never "no reason". It may be an extreme low-runner software bug or a hardware glitch, but those are reasons. We may not always be able to figure out the reason, but it is always there. Heck, even an alpha particle in a memory cell is not "no reason:.