> there were now ridiculous convoluted commands like systemd-resolve --status instead of 30 years of typing cat /etc/resolv.conf
systemd-resolved is not enabled by default in Debian and many distributions, and it is not needed in any way by systemd. If you don't like it, don't use it!
Your rant does not sound very serious. Did you really have "ntp" or "syslog" in your muscle memory? That's strange, because most syslog daemon did not have a `syslog` command.
Anyway, systemd-resolved was created because it has uses. And for systems that used a dns cache (dnsmasq, etc), rejoice, because the config is now simpler than it was.
> For decades it was /etc/init.d/myserice restart
> Now is it systemctl restart myservice or systemctl myservice restart? I have no idea as I’m not at a computer.
Before systemd, at least on Debian, for a few years the recommended way was NOT calling `/etc/init.d/something`, but instead `service apache restart`. Since sysv was unsuitable for many uses, several alternatives emerged, like "runit", or "upstart" for Ubuntu. So, before systemd, the recommended way changed with the distribution.
Thanks to systemd, most linux installs now use `systemctl restart service1 service2`. Note that you can now act on multiple services at the same time. You can use this feature as a mnemonic.
> Or the restart fails it doesn’t tell you why, ... Init.d scripts didn’t do that.
In many cases, init.d scripts told you nothing when they failed. Each service has its own procedure. Nowdays you can always see what happened with the command systemctl prints on failure.
And `systemctl cat s1` display starting instructions that are rarely longer than a dozen of lines. I remember init.d scripts that were hundreds of lines long, and awfully hard to understand.
I think most of the resentment against systemd is that it felt like it was forced down our throats. Systemd may be an improvement over the mess of shell scripts we had before but it isn't perfect. It's one thing to choose to give up decades of experience so one can voluntarily switch to a new system. It feels very difference when the choice isn't one's own.
That's a very emotional take on the whole thing. As I saw it, systemd happened and the Ubuntu developers eventually concluded "well, that's better than upstart, let's use that." Plenty of other distros made the same rational decisions. Meanwhile, the GNOME developers thought "great, people are converging around a modern init system, we can actually integrate with it now," and so they did.
Also, GNOME is not under Red Hat's control. They contribute a lot, but the leadership rarely has a majority of Red Hat employees. While a large number of contributors work there (of course they would - Red Hat is big!), the majority are - again - from elsewhere. I can think of plenty of recent features that people assume are Red Hat driven and I can assure you they definitely are not.
What your take is doing is discounting a very large number of peoples' wisdom, time, and effort, by claiming their contributions are made as helpless victims of some conspiracy or as evil supporters of it. Both of these ideas are harmful.
> plenty of recent features that people assume are Red Hat driven and I can assure you they definitely are not.
My claim is specifically that the people who added the hard dependency on systemd to GNOME were Red Hat employees. I'm not talking at all on who wrote or merged any other code in it.
What utter drivel. I've participated in the discussions around systemd in various distributions. There was a huge amount of discussion, then one by one distributions switched. Some quickly, some took various years. Again, some distributions took various years to switch.
That you can only say things such as "forced down our throats" and "duress" says enough. Not capable to actually hold a discussion, let's be emotional and without any actual facts.
Does this sound any better? Red Hat used their influence over GNOME (and other programs) to add a hard dependency on systemd to it. This forced other distros to either switch to systemd or drop support for GNOME. I suspect that had Red Hat employees not added hard dependencies on systemd to any other software, that no distributions other than Fedora and RHEL and its clones would require it.
Further, it wasn't even a hard dependency. You're really not understanding components and APIs.
> This forced other distros to either switch to systemd or drop support for GNOME.
No, again entirely incorrect. GNOME runs without systemd. A few distributions worked on ensuring GNOME runs without it. It took a while to make that happen, so for a bit some distributions needed to keep some components back. But still: you're talking about systemd while it was an interaction of a few components. Systemd consists of loads of bits.
GNOME _runs_ on distributions without systemd! It took work to make that happen, we coordinated to ensure the problems would be solved.
> I suspect that had Red Hat employees not added hard dependencies on systemd to any other software, that no distributions other than Fedora and RHEL and its clones would require it.
Again, you're so incorrect it's not funny. Arch was really quick to switch to systemd. I help out with Mageia, they really wanted to switch as well, but it took (volunteer) time to make it happen. Opensuse took a while, but still, they would've switched.
The only unique ones were Ubuntu (political crap) and Debian (partly due to political influence by Ubuntu).
Systemd was selected on merit by loads of distributions, not this conspiracy thing you're pretending it to be.
The fact that it took _work_ to get GNOME to run without systemd is a bad thing in my book.
Also, to claim that systemd was selected on merit without anything backing up the claim of "merit" is disingenuous; plenty of worse solutions end up winning all the time.
People are conflating systemd itself with all the optional services it comes bundled with. I don't even believe resolved and networkd are enabled by default, at least not by the vendor. Whether a distro enables it depends on the distro.
Part One:
---------
> systemd-resolved is not enabled by default in Debian and many distributions, and it is not needed in any way by systemd. If you don't like it, don't use it!
It's not possible to ask systemd about which parts are enabled and up to which extent. It always adds a discovery phase before starting to make changes in a system. If you don't do this discovery, you're probably in a wrestling party with systemd. If you do this discovery, it costs you time. Systemd SHALL provide a way to see how much of its enabled up to what extent.
Network Manager got this right. If there's a distribution native configuration file for an interface, Network Manager ducks out and leaves system to its own. If systemd finds an equivalent service running both in its own ecosystem and from another package, it either overrides it or collides head-on with it, so either systemd equivalent works, or nothing works as expected. Neat(!).
> Before systemd, at least on Debian, for a few years the recommended way was NOT calling `/etc/init.d/something`, but instead `service apache restart`.
That'd be RedHat family of distributions. Debian doesn't have service command out of the box. Using both for over a decade, RH uses service, Debian uses /etc/init.d
> Thanks to systemd, most linux installs now use `systemctl restart service1 service2`. Note that you can now act on multiple services at the same time. You can use this feature as a mnemonic
There was a thousand ways to do that before systemd, systemd added yet another way. It's not bad, but it was not novel in any way.
> In many cases, init.d scripts told you nothing when they failed. Each service has its own procedure. Nowdays you can always see what happened with the command systemctl prints on failure.
systemd reports the failure in the lines of "service failed to start. go look to the logs. I also probably intercepted them, so journalctl may work".
Any good init script reports the error as "I cannot find my run file and/or process, please go get the logs. Something is probably borked". It's more/less the same thing. Better reporting in systemd requires systemd targeted service files, which are not mandatory, or most practical all the time.
Part 2:
-------
Whenever something comes up about systemd, this summarized conversation comes to life:
U1: We were happy before systemd. It broke too many things, it also tried to hijack everything. Now everything is different.
U2: *defend systemd in various and countless ways*
U3/U1: You're wrong.
*A flame war ensues for some time*
However, neither of these systems have this fierce defendant army of systemd. To be brutally honest, systemd has a lot of advantages, makes many things more practical, and faster in many ways.
OTOH, systemd is not radically fast. It's faster, but not blindingly. It's practical, but not always. It's hijacking of services makes some stuff very backwards. Replacement of NTP and resolved makes things hard to manage. Default binary logs makes some admins and external systems go blind.
I'm not against progress or systemd in general, but please be a little more accommodating for neutral and negative comments about systemd. Not all the commenters are bone headed caveman who love their flint stones and reject lighters with all their life!
It absolutely is possible to do this. It's the same as finding out if any service is enabled or not. Every view of a service includes it's state and whether or not it is enabled. So if you want to check an individual service, look at systemctl status $service, and if you want to look at all services: systemctl list-unit-files
And if you want to look at only the enabled ones, you do the Unix thing and "| grep enabled"
I don't see why systemd needs to hardcode a command for this.
But this comment is totally right. If you're a Linux sysadmin, how hard is it seriously to type into a search engine "systemd list enabled services." Exactly this command very helpfully comes up in DuckDuckGo's knowledge graph bubble so you don't even need to follow the link to askubuntu. I'm sure Google search does the same.
The difference here is that systemd actually went to the individual distro maintainers and listened to their concerns, made the necessary changes, and convinced them all to adopt it. That's damn hard to do in the Linux world, I commend anyone who can do it successfully.
Regarding your part 2: For whatever reason, there is an absurd amount of misinformation posted whenever systemd comes up. If you posted something that was wrong about some other service manager, I would correct that too. You deserve to know the right answer to things, for your sake, not for the sake of systemd (or any other program). Please don't dismiss attempts to correct misinformation as being unproductive, it's the flame war which is the unproductive part.
As a sysadmin, for me things like that were very, very minor issues.
The main problem was that systemd had awful documentation, written by people who'd clearly never had to use systemd in anger and just assumed that everything would work swimmingly (and please don't say read the man pages.. those are barely adequate).
When things broke there were no simple and obvious ways to fix it, you had to dive in to its labyrinthine spaghetti architecture and hope and prayed you somehow got the Rube Goldberg machine to work.
Hopefully that's improved by now, and there's some canonical documentation that really shows you how it all fits together and how to fix it when it falls apart.
* Services started with sysvinit would put logs where they want, which is fine if you know where they are but per-service you might be guessing. Having everything always in the same place is handy.
* sysvinit wasn't giving you any of these security benefits.
* If your system really was working fine before, why did you need to upgrade it to a newer distribution with systemd?
Because the only two alternatives are 1) running mainstream distros from before 2014 or 2) running obscure distros that still don't use systemd.
Contrary to “popular misconception”, Linux is not a settler's freehold where every holdout makes their own rules.
Admins have to work with a diversity of systems. They can choose how to setup new ones, but they have to work with a range of them. What everyone does has an effect on everyone else. If some distro introduces a new way of doing things, it has some chance of ending up affecting a lot of people - they might have to adapt to also support that way, or handle it in some way.
In that way we are a village, things are connected, and that’s why there is some degree of "social control" - looking across the neighbor’s fence and meddling with their way of solving the problem - it can in some sense become ours, if we are unlucky.
Fortunately, we can relentlessly copy good solutions from others in the village too.
You can contribute to your own distro, and the "veteran UNIX admins" made Devuan. If it still counts as obscure and you don't want it to be, you - yes, you - can do something about it.
The free/open-source community is a do-ocracy. The things that are worked on are the things the people doing the work want to work on. If you have a well-paid sysadmin job where you are providing your employer value by using the work they provide you for free - and, in particular, using their ongoing work which they continuously provide you for free, because you feel like a mainstream distro from 2014 doesn't suit your needs - then you can either be grateful for what you get for free or you can contribute back.
(Which doesn't necessarily have to be contributing your own work. I'm sure if you get your employer to donate one FTE's salary to Devuan, you can change its obscurity pretty quickly!)
Traditionally developers would write code and packagers would package them into a distro specific rpm/deb -- including the init scripts (which may be pushed back upstream). Developers wanted to bypass this slow process, and there were far more developers than people willing to package the software.
Personally I've never had a problem writing an init.d script.
You should always use "service myservice start" instead of "/etc/init.d/myservice start". Running "/etc/init.d/myservice start" directly means the service ends up accidentally inheriting parts of your shell's state (environment variables, limits, current directory), which is a different environment from when the service is started at boot. The "service" command carefully cleans up most of the environment before running the script, making it much more similar to what will happen when it starts automatically on next boot.
And if you were used to "service myservice start", it now automatically forwards to "systemctl start myservice" when the /etc/init.d/myservice script does not exist, so it keeps working nearly the same after the transition to systemd.
Some things are a matter of preference, but this bit is just wrong. Init.d was hilariously worse. Some services had their own configuration locations, some had those exposed via /etc/defaults, some used syslog, some redirected stdout/stderr, some redirected one and discarded the other.
You're right that there are two places now - logs are either in the journal or in app-specific log location. And stdout/err go to the journal. Those 2 places mean fewer places to look through than we had before.
Thing is, it was never this command, it was always https://linux.die.net/man/8/service , but your command also worked in 99% of the times, until it didn't and restarted service misbehave. Systemd streamlined whole experience.
From what I remember, everyone else on UNIX world was already following up on systemd like systems before it got adopted on Linux world, and on Red-Hat/SuSE distributions daemon scripts existed for quite a long time as well, so no it wasn't * /etc/init.d/myserice restart* for decades.
Actually long before that it was service restart myservice, which still works.
service myserver restart
/etc/init.d/myserver restart
$ service myserver status
$ service myserver reload
$ service myserver restart
# /etc/init.d/myserver reload
unknown command reload
# /etc/init.d/myserver restart
unknown command restart
# /etc/init.d/myserver stop
myserver: warning: frobulator did not fully unfurl
# /etc/init.d/myserver start
myserver: still running on pid 1234
# kill -TERM 1234
kill: (1234) - No such process
# grep "running on pid" /etc/init.d/myserver
echo "$0: still running on pid `cat /var/run/myserver.pid`"
# rm -f /var/run/myserver.pid
# /etc/init.d/myserver start
For logging, can't you write a systemd service in bash with -x flag?
The best solution is to maintain infinite bash history and stop trying to remember arcane stuff.
Don't even get me started on tools like jq - so convoluted that I use python instead
I felt so alone in the world until this moment
https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/06/08/anatomy-of-a-linux-dns-l...
Its not just breaking init.d scripts, it’s ntp, dns, syslog. Systems throughout the OS fail to things that were no longer short commands with muscle memeory, there were now ridiculous convoluted commands like systemd-resolve --status instead of 30 years of typing cat /etc/resolv.conf
Even when you remember and type that in, you don’t get a simple list of nameserver and host, you get 100 lines of text you have to spend effort parsing to work out what’s going on.
When it’s less mental effort to run tcpdump port 53 to see where your DNS is going, there’s a problem.
For decades it was /etc/init.d/myserice restart
Now is it systemctl restart myservice or systemctl myservice restart? I have no idea as I’m not at a computer.
Or the restart fails it doesn’t tell you why, it gives you two locations to look for log files about why it might have broken. Init.d scripts didn’t do that. Even if there was something really wrong that log files don’t reveal, running init.d with bash -x allowed easy debugging
Systemd came in and changed working processes and systems and gave very little benefit to people with working processes and systems from a operator point of view.