Re:System Down: A systemd-journald exploit
by dijit on Thursday January 10, 2019 @10:59AM
(#18874775)
The truth here is very simple honestly.
SystemD turns your bash scripts into C, and then gives you a config file input.
Before this; on RHEL systems there were similar initiatives, you /rarely/ touched the init scripts, you used the /etc/sysconfig/ directory of configuration files[0];
The major difference being that system administrators could actually tell you line-by-line what was happening. In C you would have to find the version of the code in some version control somewhere and hope that there's not patches applied.
The absolute truth is that you cannot know what systemd is doing, you cannot even strace it. You /rely/ on it telling you the truth and doing the right thing.
And honestly I don't trust it to do the right thing when it can't even get encoding right[1].
SystemD turns your bash scripts into C, and then gives you a config file input.
Before this; on RHEL systems there were similar initiatives, you /rarely/ touched the init scripts, you used the /etc/sysconfig/ directory of configuration files[0];
The major difference being that system administrators could actually tell you line-by-line what was happening. In C you would have to find the version of the code in some version control somewhere and hope that there's not patches applied.
The absolute truth is that you cannot know what systemd is doing, you cannot even strace it. You /rely/ on it telling you the truth and doing the right thing.
And honestly I don't trust it to do the right thing when it can't even get encoding right[1].
[0]: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
[1]: https://imgur.com/a/6aiXrEg