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How to Avoid Systemd?

posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday February 26 2014, @08:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the Boot-him?-I-just-met-him! dept.

jbernardo writes:

"Having had several issues with systemd, and really not liking the philosophy behind it, I am looking into alternatives. I really prefer something that follows the Unix philosophy of using small, focused, and independent tools, with a clear interface. Unfortunately, my favourite distro, Arch Linux, is very much pro-systemd, and a discussion of alternatives is liable to get you banned for a month from their forums. There is an effort to support openrc, but it is still in its infancy and without much support.

So, what are the alternatives, besides Gentoo? Preferably binary... I'd rather have something like arch, with quick updates, cutting edge, but I've already used a lot in the past Mandrake, RedHat, SourceMage, Debian, Kubuntu, and so on, so the package format or the package management differences don't scare me."

[ED Note: I'm imagining FreeBSD sitting in the room with the all the Linux distros he mentioned being utterly ignored like Canada in Hetalia.]

 
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  • (Score: 1) by jbernardo on Friday February 28 2014, @05:06AM

    by jbernardo (300) on Friday February 28 2014, @05:06AM (#8383)

    SysVinit scripts don't have any way to restart services that have quit/crashed. That is EXTREMELY important on servers, and it's absence is notable on Linux.

    This is the dumbest thing a sysadmin can do, have services by default restart automatically on crash. You should first try to identify the problem cause before relaunching the service, to make sure it won't happens again.
    If you have a critical service that needs to be restarted, there is daemontools and some other alternatives. Making the automatic restart a default and part of the init system is dumb and dangerous, just serves to "hide under the rug" any issues that the crashing services have, until it is too late, and you have data corruption or worse.

    This approach is for me the worst - "as I don't understand why people would use two tools with two complementary philosophies, I make this impossible, by adding the functionality I use to the main tool and making it impossible to be replaced without replacing everything and the kitchen sink".

  • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Friday February 28 2014, @09:14AM

    by evilviper (1760) on Friday February 28 2014, @09:14AM (#8462) Journal

    Your comment just oozes with obvious ignorance about managing hundreds of servers doing serious work. You would NOT want to be paged at 3am just because nscd crashed after 600 days of uptime. It's utterly idiotic to claim someone needs to investigate every such happenstance, or that you should rewrite all your startup scripts so every system service is run out of daemontools. After all.. ANY service that you need to have running is "critical" and failure can't be ignored.

    You offered ZERO example scenarios to backup your breathless assertion for how automatic service restarts are or can be either stupid or dangerous. If there was any such issue, it would be looming over daemontools since forever, and the widespread adoption of systemd by every distro out there just serves to show the experts know something you obviously do not.

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