Recent Comments

Errm, what facts, exactly?

Exactly. Whenever some systemd proponent tries to market their shiny, they never bother with the facts. Look at the posts in this story. Anti-systemd guys talk about some serious problems with systemd and the proponents simply go, "Bah, you don't know better than Debian people". No addressing of the facts, nothing to back it up. Nothing.

This has been typical response in all the stories about this old issue. This is because it's just marketing, there is nothing to support systemd. Maybe in the future they can implement a halfway decent system but for now, it sucks. They know it and are in denial.

When I changed jobs earlier this year I lost access to the Blackberry and the Winphone I'd been using. Believe it or not, I miss the BB a slight bit, but the Winphone not at all. Wife's got an iphone, but I vastly prefer my Samsung Note 3, stylus and all. Android Jellybean, nice fast processor, and apps I like. Yeah, Android has got its quirks, but I wouldn't trade it for an iphone at this point, no way.

Very curious about Jolla/Sailfish these days though. Ubuntuphone and Mozillaphone (or whatever they call it), not so much. But it would be nice to see something shake up the system. Feel like Google and Apple could use a little more competitive pressure in the ecosystem. See where tablet sales have plateaued? Anyone who wants one has one, and there's not a huge incentive to go get a new one, really.

I can understand Mozilla and crew feeling upset that Microsoft has done essentially what they did back in 2003 or so (and gotten punished for). And I can understand Microsoft feeling so proud of their new browser that they want to show it off. But it's a kind of dickish move on both sides.

Microsoft got taken to the courts for changing or limiting browser preferences about ten years ago, and though the American DOJ had a sudden burst of gonadis-evaporitis when it came time to punish Microsoft for monopolist behavior, the European Union stuck it to them. This isn't that different, though the market has changed a bit.

As for Mozilla, I'd feel more pity for them if Firefox weren't such a heaping pile of fail these days (and I should know, I'm posting from it). These recent innovations like force-installing Pocket and so on have made it pretty damned clear they're whoring themselves out for the money at the moment, and will install whatever you want them to if a hefty payout is attached to the request. Firefox is really testing my patience, and the fact that they're simply aping Chrome's interface is pretty damned telling, if you ask me.

Currently pinning my hopes on Vivaldi, though Palemoon and Seahorse remain semi-usable. Given the importance of a decent browser these days, we need alternatives to Google and Webkit. Konqueror is all but abandoned, Opera (my former favorite) sucks donkey balls, Firefox needs a change of leadership and a new development team focused on technical - not financial - goals, and Safari: meh. Wish we had more vibrant competition in the browser space instead of a contest of how much each can mimic Chrome. The one thing I really do like about Firefox is the "Its all Text" and "Noscript" plugins, and the Overbite plugin since I'm a recent fan of gopherspace. But can't we have that plugin system without all the rest of the crap that Firefox now dooms you to?

This is a far better and more likely to succeed plan to bring IE/Edge back to browser domination. Go Microsoft!

but even snailmail requires careful attention - fingerprints, handwriting, phrasing -and- printers can be identifiable, in addition to hints given by postmark. of course it all depends on the level of attention you think someone will give to tracking you down...if someone is going to put the effort to find you through the tor network, they're likely to be able to use the above to find you through mail too.

My sister was thinking of whistle blowing. It was really more of an incompetence thing than anything really serious.

She asked me how to do that anonymously. I thought about it a minute. She's email savvy, but not tech savvy... All those anonymizers can be tricky, and who knows which have been compromised... Just seemed like a lot of hassle.

Put it on paper and drop it in the mail.

Hacking Team had no exploits for an un-jail-broken iPhone.

That's an extremely narrow anecdote that doesn't prove much of anything, just that the particular group mentioned doesn't happen put much effort into iOS. There's no denying there are LOTS of iPhone/iOS vulnerabilities. See:

* http://www.rapid7.com/db/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Apple+IOS&t=a
.

time and time again it seems that iOS is the most secure one of the three.

No, it doesn't seem that way at all:

"the vast majority of all mobile phone vulnerabilities that have been discovered so far have been found in Apple's smartphones. The firm found 210 vulnerabilities in the iPhone, giving iOS an 81% share of known mobile phone vulnerabilities"
* http://bgr.com/2013/03/26/iphone-security-software-vulnerabilities-ios-397421/
.

Hacking Team had no exploits for Nokia 3310. Seems like the platform of choice if you want to stay secure. :-)

So, having a device that the user has no control over is better? No.

Quoting Bruce Schneier (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/07/hacking_teams_p.html):
Hacking Team had no exploits for an un-jail-broken iPhone. Seems like the platform of choice if you want to stay secure.

I know it's an unpopular opinion but time and time again it seems that iOS is the most secure one of the three.

My complaint isn't about systemd. I've made that clear from the start. It's a question of journalistic integrity.

If you can't see that, then you're right - nothing you can say is going to be very helpful, and I'm wasting my time and yours both.

Good luck with the site.

Even if I didn't have any phone service, I'd still carry around a cheap old phone (at least in the car) to take photos, get driving-directions/find stores, read email and RSS feeds (updating when near WiFi), play games, be able to call 911, give search&rescue a signal to follow, etc.

But I really can't see opting-out of having phone service these days, as there are several available for FREE, and very cheap, today.

If you've got just any licensed Android 4+ device, you can install the Hangouts Dialer to make and receive calls via your Google Voice number (via WiFi). Even without an Android device, you could still get a Google Voice #, and check your voicemail messages online.

If you have a Sprint/Boost/Virgin phone*, you can bring it to RingPlus and get 125 minutes/40sms/10MB without even giving your credit card#. They play music & ads (instead of just ringing back). and of course hope you'll want to upgrade to a paid service (starting at $2) later. NOTE: Verify phone compatibility right away, and quickly return/exchange any used phone that fails activation checks.

--Less Recomended--
FreedomPop also offers BYOD on Sprint & offers 200minutes/500sms/500MB if you don't mind paying $20 in activation fees, a few dollars for voicemail, and constantly trying to trick you into buying extra services.

You can buy an Ooma Telo VoIP device for ~$100 and get mostly-unlimited free VoIP calling if you're careful to opt-out of extra services, and already have a good internet service.

I hated the old days, when phone service I only barely used was $30+/month, plus some minimum monthly fee for long-distance I almost never used, and that on-top of monthly (slow) internet service subscription, while being inundated with sneaky telemarketers and worse.

* http://www.prepaidphonenews.com/2015/02/sprints-blacklist-is-gone-but-byosp-is.html

Actually, it's the OTHER systemd stories that hit |. that were slanted opinion pieces. Quite a few of them, too. I don't recall you complaining about any one of those. This doesn't qualify, because the claims made are factually supportable and settled, even when just correcting misconceptions and inaccurate arguments previously used. That you still can't see any of that says worlds about your own bias, and I doubt anything else I can say to you will help.

Switched to PC-BSD from openSUSE earlier this summer and have no regrets. It wasn't a blind install - I've used it before and like it. But PC-BSD gets you a working FreeBSD install with minimum fuss, and unless you have the bad luck of hardware that FreeBSD doesn't like (laptops and wifi cards can be a hassle), you've got a sweet *nix system that does everything your Linux distro did, and no systemd. A lot of other conservative choices, too.

I'm not writing to gloat. Just pointing out: if you don't like systemd, switch your operating system. Pretty sure Slackware also avoids systemd. Vote with your feet, people.

you certainly can't claim Linux was sleek and simple and clean before systemd. For many years there has been a huge mess with ConsoleKit, NetworkManager, avahi, dbus, dcop, hal, pam.d, udev, devfsd, sysfs, +proc, devtmpfs, kudzu, zeroconf, and much more crud. It seems to me that when USB came along and make extreme plug-and-play user-facing, Linux distros just kept throwing in everything but the kitchen sink to make each scenario work right for ignorant desktop users and GUI management tools (and a nightmare to configure and debug for administrators).

I don't recall claiming that Linux was "sleek and simple and clean" before systemd. I know things can get messy and complicated (I'm a *nix system administrator by trade). I'm simply stating that in my opinion, systemd is not necessarily the solution that should be sought.

Maybe systemd is not actually be the best answer to that problem, certainly the BSDs manage to work fine without the Linux insanity I listed above,

Well... The BSDs manage, but they have their own problems. FreeBSD has (from my view) a serious problem with software availability. If you wanted to add something and it wasn't in the official repository or in Ports, you have to get the source, else you are stuck. If you're lucky, you might be able to get the Linux binaries, and there are libraries to allow you to run most Linux-compiled programs on FreeBSD. I don't have more than a cursory experience with NetBSD or OpenBSD, but I would imagine the issues there are similar.

...but at least it is finally some progress towards unification and simplification of the complete mess.

I might point out that many issues related to the hodge-podge nature of drivers and the like are due to the major distributions' approach to inclusion. Instead of Red Hat/Fedora making an official repository available with vendor drivers for certain hardware (video cards, in particular) or codecs (*cough*MP3*cough*), they have chosen to refuse to make them available at all. This leads people to find unofficial repositories, some of which can be trusted, some which no sane admin could trust.

Either way, if systemd is supposed to be a tool that replaces all sorts of things, I think it's a Bad Idea^tm. Many can easily make a case that sysVinit is broken and needs to be replaced. Fine. There are several options available. I'm largely annoyed that systemd has forced its way into almost every distribution to the point where even if one does choose another init system, systemd is still active because it's required for other things.

"Unification"? Isn't that what Microsoft does?

We are screwed. Plain and simple. On the bright side, I have learnt how to strip it out of Debian manually. We don't need a Debian fork. We just need a tool to remove and disable systemd.

certainly more toxic ones, but if they are right about being 1/5 of the effect, China is by far the largest grower so this actually does have potential to make a significant difference. The flip side, any worthy improvements will be lobbied as reasons to lax on other emission regulation :/

I suppose my point is that the post isn't about Bruce Bryfield's article. It's primarily evilviper's opinion, posted as news with Bryfield's piece linked to in passing.

I'll admit to being in the anit-systemd camp, but that's not what annoyed me here. It's posting opinion and advocacy as news. I don't mind anyone having an opinion, but a responsible news outlet needs to distinguish between reporting things that have happened and the editor sounding off about whatever has them steamed up at any given moment.

And the fact that most of the systemd debate has been very low grade doesn't really excuse |. from joining the race to the bottom. Or maybe it does: it's a question of what sort of site Pipedot wants to be.

Yeah it was probably the best phone I have ever owned (until a 'friend' threw me an my N9 into the sea at a beach party).

No, if this was /. this would be yet another ranting anti-systemd story...

Yes, yes, yes. the shortcomings of Slashdot are well known. I visit this site in the hopes that it might not share them.

"If you fight against monsters you should take care that in the process you do not become a monster yourself".

click through to the source for yourself. Note all those pesy facts and figures...

Errm, what facts, exactly? All due respect to Bruce Bryfield, but he posted a blog entry presenting an unsupported opinion piece. The only figures present are where he reports the total donations received by Devuan to date. The only facts I can see apart from that are that Lennart Poettering is involved and a lot of people don't like him very much.

He doesn't even try and summarise the arguments pro-systemd, let alone the ones against. It's hardly a ringing vindication for either side of the debate. I don't think it was ever intended to be.

This is also not a |. editorial at all, either

You posted a highly partisan opinion, presented it as news and backed it up with one solitary link to an equally partisan blog post. If you'd said "Bruce Bryfield has posted an interesting article advocating acceptance of systemd. I think he makes some good points, what do you think?" then I wouldn't have an objection. Instead you posted one saying "I'm right, anyone who disagrees with me is wrong, and by the way this dude (who I can't even be bothered to name) agrees with me, so that settles it".

I'm sorry, but regardless of whether your opinion is right or wrong, you're still editorializing. And I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to do that. I just ask that you draw a clear line between your opinions and what you're reporting as news. I hadn't thought it was a lot to ask.

Systemd may not be ideal, but most users are unlikely to make a fuss so long as their systems continue to boot and function the way they are supposed to.

my concern has been and is still about the security of systemd. it's a huge amount of unproven code and it's running as root at all times. when someone finds a remote exploit, it's going to be worse than heartbleed because it will be a backdoor into a large number of servers. will people care then?

China's got a very long list of emissions sources to address before they're going to mess with their rice paddies.

While a reasonable point, you certainly can't claim Linux was sleek and simple and clean before systemd. For many years there has been a huge mess with ConsoleKit, NetworkManager, avahi, dbus, dcop, hal, pam.d, udev, devfsd, sysfs, +proc, devtmpfs, kudzu, zeroconf, and much more crud. It seems to me that when USB came along and make extreme plug-and-play user-facing, Linux distros just kept throwing in everything but the kitchen sink to make each scenario work right for ignorant desktop users and GUI management tools (and a nightmare to configure and debug for administrators).

With systemd starting to take over bits of some of those, I'm hoping for a bright future where there's one little simple place where such device configuration can be done (and those being the same across distros, and also not changing between each major release), and not several that do different but partially-overlapping bits of the puzzle, as we have to tolerate now. Maybe systemd is not actually be the best answer to that problem, certainly the BSDs manage to work fine without the Linux insanity I listed above, but at least it is finally some progress towards unification and simplification of the complete mess.

For ME, I don't like the way that systemd is marketed as a "sysVinit replacement", but systemd has hooks into all sorts of things, including (but certainly not limited to) system logging and GUI applications.

If sysVinit is going to be replaced, let it be replaced by an actual init system, not something that has more in common with mold, getting its tendrils into everything imaginable.

That is, admittedly, a personal opinion. I'm currently running Devuan on a netbook and I'm quite happy with it. Would I *use* another distro? Sure, if I had to. If I have a choice though...

That is a good read. In no way does it help to make systemd more palatable. If anything reading this makes it worse.
Far worse.
There are some good idea there. Pity about the implementation.

Fracking produces a relatively small percentage of natural gas.

You don't have to do it that way at all. You call whatever script you want from your LaunchAgent and tell it when to fire, and you can do it via a graphical XML editor if that's such a hurdle.

Or you can put your scripts in /etc/periodic/(daily|weekly|monthly) if you want anacron functionality.

Or you can just keep on using cron! It is called by launchd, but that shouldn't make a difference. Point is, you're not forced to delve into launchd or write "lines upon lines" of XML to schedule jobs.

Corruption is rarely relevant when it comes to logs. Logs in important systems are frequently archived, and as any backup they are stored in a reliable manner. The single most important thing about logs is how they are USED. If you just let the logs sit on your HDD, then there's no point in collecting them (increase your logging level to ERROR and be done with it). I, on the other hand, use logs to audit systems continuously, and if some software is introduced that makes it more difficult to analyze the logs then it is a serious problem for me.

The problem I have with journald is that it makes handling the logs more complicated, without providing any benefit compared with alternative solutions. The alleged benefits (e.g. binary logs) are already implemented in all other systems, and those implementations are more thought-through than those of the SystemD-team, as each development team can focus on polishing a single tool rather than a beowulf of programs (this is the Unix-philosophy in a nutshell). Storing logs as binary files, for example, is either done using logrotate (for archiving in compressed files) or by forwarding selected parts of the syslog stream to a database (for future analysis).

Therefore, the only way to make useful log analysis with JournalD is to configure it to forward everything to regular syslog, and add your regular analysis tools to the syslog stream. This means that in a system with both log analysis and SystemD, journald is an extra step in your pipeline which doesn't contribute with any functionality. In addition, this means that all logs (which are generated as text) must be converted into binary only to be re-converted back to text before being forwarded to analysis tools.

Now you're probably saying that tools can read the binary files straight-up in order to make things more efficient. This is true, but the problem is that there are programs which log to their own logfiles, rather than passing their logs via the syslog functionality. This means that the log analysis solution must still be capable of handling text files. This means that you must have support for both the binary format and the text format, rather than (as with other solutions) just handling text files. This (once again) increases complexity without adding any value, which is bad.

Tl;dr: Fuck Journald.

Hi pipedot, I'm an AC who has wandered over from slashdot for the first time. Is it considered acceptable use for companies to sell their products within the comments here like this? If so I'll keep a wanderin'...

...and having a special baggie to put your keys in (and take out of every time you want to use)? Seems more inconvenient than the good old-fashioned button on the keyfob, doncha think? For the cost of a Fob Guard you could get your remote entry key coded to an after-market press button keyfob. Problem solved.

I don't have a phone anymore since about two and a half year, and I love it.

I never miss it, except when buying (for example) a plane ticket through the internet because most sites refuse to make a booking without a phone number.

It looks like Puppet can handle anything you throw at it, if you throw it well, not just systemd. Are you talking about the d-bus interface?

I read most of that post, but I still don't understand who this is intended for. Fast booting doesn't make sense for servers. They are not booted frequently, it's fine if a server boots in 10 minutes instead of 2. What matters is that it boots consistent with its intended configuration. That post talks a lot about how starting services in parallel speeds up things, and most importantly lazy activation. Lazy activation is unacceptable, at least in our setup. We'd like to know of a failure (most often misconfiguation) as soon as possible at boot time, not when we actually need the service.

It doesn't make sense for workstations either. On workstations, there is often NO service running. We have the servers for that. Booting a workstation fast is a piece of cake, really. Mount your drives, get a network address, start up a couple daemons like the logger and the console and you're done. You don't need a complicated, hard to configure program to do that. Unless you redefine X11 display to be a service, the mouse driver to be a service etc. It doesn't make sense. Help me with this.

It very much looks like Lennart is bored with fucking up the audio system and is trying to fail at something new.

I love systemd, but I have to be honest, the logs are binary. There are tools for getting text out of them, which can then be piped into any cli text tool you want. you can also run syslog in parallel, if you'd like. But as I said earlier, binary isn't bad when the format is well documented.

https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/systemd/journal-files/

It can be configured to automatically restart services that exit, provides features that support configuration management engines like Puppet, automatically handles service dependencies, and more.

You can also see "A short list of other features:"
* http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

Just out of curiosity, what is this talk about systemd being targetted at maintainers with lots of machines? Does it have some kind of remote management interface? I keep hearing about this but the systemd webpage isn't very helpful. Any quick comments?

Besides "money" why would car makers alienate their customers by giving their personal data to Google etc?

We are switching to RH soon. Regardless of init system. If SystemD causes problems there will be Hell to pay. By us. Against us. Redhat could cause hundreds of people to avoid them if this borks badly. People carry grievences for a long time. We shall see what happens. I step forward with eyes and mind open.

I really wonder what's behind the binary log complaints. If the format is open and the file gets corrupted, its still easily to figure out the content. Its not encrypted

True statement.

launchd inspired upstart.
Pottering wanted to modify upstart, but the copyright assignment wasn't cool with him or his company. So, systemd is really pottering's rewrite/refactoring of upstart.

So yes, its very much Mac like in that regard. But on the plus side, the config files are pretty straight forward ini files ( ok it has a little MS inspiration too).

Binary logging is a myth. You can still read the logs with any test editor. You can also use jourald for some nice features, but it is not required; the logs are not binary.

Agreed the submission is very slanted, but many systemd submissions have been slanted. I'm not slamming it hard or anything. The "who's afraid" part is a loaded term, but that may not have been the intention. A non native english speaker for example would not necessarily be expected to be very proficient with the nuances of various terms.

OK, here's my input. I'm not "afraid" of it but I still resent the steamroller, and I have grave misgivings about rolling up too much stuff in it. But I use it every day - I'm running Arch on my desktop.

I have gone further out of my way than I already was to get experience and familiarity with FreeBSD, spurred in part by the weakness in linux design directions revealed by the systemd steamroller.

Finally, yes, I am aware that "steamroller" is a loaded term also :-)

No, if this was /. this would be yet another ranting anti-systemd story... they love to fan the flames no matter what the facts might be. This is also not a |. editorial at all, either, click through to the source for yourself. Note all those pesy facts and figures...

The web without adblock (plus/edge/varient), ghostery, HTTPS everywhere is terrible. How do people survive using just IE...

Microsoft purchased Skype. Millions left for other services. Microsoft replaced the front end of its software, Lync, with something called "Skype for Business" which is just crap. Both efforts are a failure.

So... any theories on how this could have evolved?

It's not clear that there is actually much wrong with systemd except the binary logging. But it's not clear that there isn't. And there were lots of horror stories about unrecoverable errors around a year ago. Perhaps they've addressed it since then.

OTOH, init was working perfectly fine in my use case, and I'd really rather not have switched. And systemd seems intent on swallowing so much stuff that nothing will work on both an init based system and a systemd based system. They aren't there yet, but...

So I don't trust the developers. And I'm upset at being coerced into using it. I *am* using it, but I'd really rather not be doing so. Systemd seems designed for administrators who administer a large number of servers/workstations/pcs. That's not me, and I'm unhappy at being coerced into using it. If Devuan ever gets its act together, I may well switch.

It looks and feels like something from microsoft.

Or Apple. I'm forced to keep a Mac. It has "launchd" and I freaking hate it with a passion. Especially because it subsumed cron. Now, in order to schedule jobs, you have to write lines upon lines of fucking XML. No way.

People also forget the Redhat's target is enterprise and enterprise is incredibly slow. My relatively small group isn't scheduled to finish testing a version with systemd until the end of the year.

There will certainly be some huge corporations that are upset about the switching costs, and how they are handled will be what decides systemd's future.

Perhaps next time try addressing at least one of the real points I made.

Where there is smoke...

Reviving the discussion for a good old PIR is always welcome. Has systemd won? Are users moving away to nonsystemd platforms? Will this impact the enterprise linux users? Does anyone care?

Frankly, I am more concerned about the TPP right now.