System Down: A systemd-journald exploit

Re:System Down: A systemd-journald exploit by Tor3 on Thursday January 10, 2019 @09:40AM (#18874097)

I need to run /usr/bin/expect from one of the init.d scripts. That breaks with systemd. Moving that box to Devuan (no systemd) fixed the issue. The alternative was to rebuild that particular application without systemd. So far systemd hasn't brought me anything particularly useful. I've never had any issues with getting things working (pre-systemd), and one of my pre-systemd laptops boots from power off to fully graphical in five seconds, so I don't buy the argument I hear from some that systemd is necessary for reducing boot-up time.

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Re:System Down: A systemd-journald exploit by theamk on Thursday January 10, 2019 @01:14PM (#18876333)

I made a typo in lighttpd's config once. sysvinit init script, which used start-stop-daemon, would report success, but would not start the server at all. There was no error messages, nothing in the system log.

Systemd logs all process output by default, so things like this cannot happen at all. Just for that, I'd choose it over sysvinit any time.

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Re:System Down: A systemd-journald exploit by codedokode on Thursday January 10, 2019 @05:18PM (#18878857)

I had a similar issue with systemd in Debian. Restarting the service (Apache) via systemd actually had no effect, and calling init.d script worked.

By the way, I am not a fan of sysvinit: I read all those shell scripts.

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Re:System Down: A systemd-journald exploit by theamk on Friday January 11, 2019 @01:03AM (#18881346)

I am going to guess you did not start the apache via systemd? This is actually a feature: systemd only manages processes it has started. So if you started apache via /etc/init.d, you should restart it via /etc/init.d as well.

(note that the opposite is not true: many /etc/init.d scripts stop process by killing everything with this process name -- no matter if it is the right process, or user-specific one, or one managed by some other supervisor)

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Re:System Down: A systemd-journald exploit by codedokode on Friday January 11, 2019 @07:03AM (#18882891)

I don't remember exactly, but I think Apache was started via systemd because there was no error like "Apache is not started". Systemd was reporting that it is stopping and starting Apache but in fact it did nothing.

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Re:System Down: A systemd-journald exploit by ibotty on Thursday January 10, 2019 @10:26AM (#18874464)

You know you can run scripts to start something up with systemd as well?

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Re:System Down: A systemd-journald exploit by ciupicri on Thursday January 10, 2019 @10:01AM (#18874260)

How does systemd break Expect?

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Re:System Down: A systemd-journald exploit by theamk on Thursday January 10, 2019 @05:52PM (#18879210)

I am going to guess that process required a tty for some reason, and the systemd unit file did not specify

    StandardOutput=tty

nor did he wrap the invocation in `unbuffer` program

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Re:System Down: A systemd-journald exploit by zbentley on Friday January 11, 2019 @08:31AM (#18883432)

> I need to run /usr/bin/expect from one of the init.d scripts

That's interesting. Can you provide some more details?

To clarify: I don't care about the systemd argument; I'm interested in why an init script would need expect. I can think of a few pretty edge-casey good reasons and some scary ones. Care to share yours?

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