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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: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-19 22:08 (#2TG3)

That's what I was wondering. If a service is restarting itself all the time, how would you know? Oh, by monitoring logs and fixing the problem? How about you do that when it breaks and stops running the first time or two, when you actually notice because you DIDN'T have a Windows style service manager restarting it for you?

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

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-19 23:24 (#2TG6)

If a service is restarting itself all the time, how would you know?
Because you have monitoring systems in place that report such status information, and because any decent admin will configure a service manager to only restart the process a few times in a short period, before giving-up. "Monitoring logs" is only something you do at home... It doesn't scale. You can't do system monitoring that way.
How about you do that when it breaks and stops running the first time or two
Already addressed this, TWICE, in my post. Look for 'crond'. The most rock-solid stable and reliable service will crash, on occasion, in ways that do not need nor would benefit from investigation. Across many hundreds of servers running numerous services, this is a daily occurrence.

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

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-20 15:44 (#2TGZ)

Because you have monitoring systems in place that report such status information, and because any decent admin will configure a service manager to only restart the process a few times in a short period, before giving-up. "Monitoring logs" is only something you do at home... It doesn't scale. You can't do system monitoring that way.
You don't directly monitor logs on production machines past a certain number. Most companies get by with just 2 or 3 email servers and these machines are often monitored manually.
The most rock-solid stable and reliable service will crash, on occasion, in ways that do not need nor would benefit from investigation
Nor from automatic restart since it only happens "on occasion" and anything critical will be monitored. And because we are talking "critical", an administrator will be on call anyway.

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

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-20 17:44 (#2TH4)

"On occasion" across many hundreds of servers quickly becomes a daily occurance.

Of course I've already said that a dozen times now... Willful obstinance and ignorance doesn't make you look smarter.

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

by fnj@pipedot.org on 2014-10-21 04:32 (#2THQ)

And repetition does not magically make an argument persuasive.

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

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-10-21 13:16 (#2TJ1)

It happens to be a fact, and nobody has even attempted to refute it, so apparently everyone agrees, and just wants to pretend they didn't hear it due to how badly it destroys their world-view.

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

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-21 14:29 (#2TJ6)

Great, so let's accept your position that the tiny number of organizations who rely on "hundreds" of like servers and can't be bothered to write their own restart scripts are to benefit from an all-encompassing process controller like systemd.

Okay, so why burden the rest of the world with the same monstrosity when they (a) DON'T need it and (b) might actually prefer to prevent process crashes and maintain their own systems to restart them?

Also, I note that an actual real-live registered user chimed in and you are now powerless to complain about ACs this time. :)

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

by caseih@pipedot.org on 2014-10-21 14:51 (#2TJA)

Feel free to continue to use what works for you.

It's not just a tiny number of organizations though. More and more organizations are deploying virtual machines and containers. In a more dynamic server system like this, the old way of doing things shows its limits. I have written my own restart scripts on many occasions, but it sucks and I'm tired of the hacks. Even in a small organization, I've had race conditions with NFS, openldap, and network connectivity stop booting in its tracks on many occasions. I used to change inittab to start a getty right at the beginning of the init process so I could log in and kick things when necessary (requiring physical access to the server, which sucked big time, but virtualized consoles improved that dramatically). So even for small organizations of one or two servers, the init script system does have problems still.

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2014-10-21 19:03 Interesting +1 evilviper@pipedot.org

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