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Re:System Down: A systemd-journald exploit by astine on Thursday January 10, 2019 @03:17PM (#18877647)
The thing is, most Linux distributions ran services this way for well over two decades.

So? That doesn't mean it was the best way to do things. Humanity existed for thousands of years without vaccines and still managed but that doesn't mean that disease wasn't a thing. Misbehaving services have always been a thing and they've always been a problem. I know because I've dealt with them. If you feel that other methods for dealing with misbehaving services are better, fair enough, but don't appeal to a mythical golden age where everybody wrote software without bugs.

Re:System Down: A systemd-journald exploit by rleigh on Thursday January 10, 2019 @03:38PM (#18877860)
I'm not in any way appealing to a "mythical golden age". I'm simply pointing out that the whole Linux world ran this way for over two decades without this being a critical problem, or even a problem of particular note.

Not only that, but automated service restarting was configurable if desired, albeit not the default. If you wanted it, it was doable with ease. This is not a new feature which systemd brought to the table, it was already available.

Re:System Down: A systemd-journald exploit by astine on Thursday January 10, 2019 @03:53PM (#18878023)
The sentence: Firstly, because they used to be written sufficiently well that they never crashed, because competent people wrote them. IS an appeal to a golden age. Because it's not true. People did write services that crashed and sysadmins had to work around them. I know this to be the case because I had to work with a particularly egregious example. Whether you think the older methods for managing them were better is one thing, but those problems existed and they caused lots of damage.