[gentoo-dev] Re: eselect init

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Pacho Ramos posted on Fri, 21 Jun 2013 17:48:59 +0200 as excerpted:

> El vie, 21-06-2013 a las 09:36 -0500, William Hubbs escribió:
> [...]
>> No, he has his own versions of the systemd and sysvinit ebuilds which
>> move some of the installation to non-standard places as part of this
>> machinery, so it is not opt-in.
>> 
>> Also, there was an email on this thread showing that using
>> init=/sbin/einit works, so I'm not seeing what mgorny's objections are.
>> 
>> William
> 
> I think mgorny was referring to a case where einit fails to work and,
> then, kernel will fallback to using /sbin/init, that could cause
> problems as it would always run /sbin/init from sysvinit... but maybe he
> was referring to something else :|

This is my understanding as well.  If there's a problem with /sbin/einit, 
the kernel will fallback to /sbin/init.  If /sbin/init runs a sysv init 
that's setup for an old, no longer sysadmin maintained openrc (or 
whatever other) setup, there's little telling what sort of unpredictable 
things that openrc config from three years ago might end up doing to a 
painstakingly configured systemd (or runit, or...) current config.

That's the worry, and as an admin, I'd be worried about it myself, but in 
practice, I'm not sure it's particularly valid, simply because in the 
real world, the failures are more likely to be full service breakage, 
etc, than they are to be anything really destructive.

The caveat, and this one's big enough to give an admin ulcers for sure, 
is if the machine is a server, and that old no-longer-maintained openrc 
config starts up say a no-longer-maintained sshd instance with a poor 
password that has long since been forgotten about, thus exposing the 
machine to any cracker taking a probe.  However unlikely that is (such an 
unmaintained sshd config should have long since been removed on any 
responsibly administered gentoo system), just the possibility is enough 
to give a responsible admin ulcers worrying about it, because even 
responsible sysadmins fat-finger things, or simply forget about them, 
once in awhile.  THAT's our REAL weakness, and we know it all too well!

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman