Re: [gentoo-user] Debian just voted in systemd for default init system in jessie

[Mark David Dumlao <madumlao@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 5:52 PM, J. Roeleveld <joost@antarean.org> wrote:
> On Tue, February 18, 2014 10:47, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>> On 18/02/2014 05:46, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
>>> I used to use cherokee. Fast, light, awesome, and with a web admin.
>>> The init script always failed me. /etc/init.d/cherokee stop was not a
>>> guaranteed stop to all forked cherokee processes - the parent pid
>>> dies, but some forked process or something, usually related to
>>> rrdtool, doesn't. Or the parent does exit and erases the pid file but
>>> it returns control immediately and its not yet done exiting. Something
>>> like that or other. Point is, I've several times had to ps aux|grep
>>> ... kill; zap; start - on production servers.
>>
>>
>> Valid point. Other than vixie-cron (damn thing just never seems to die
>> properly on any platform so restarts always fail) I don't really run
>> into these issues
>
> Interesting, I have never had issues with restarting vixie-cron using the
> supplied init-scripts.
>
>> What I do run into is daemons that drop privs on start up, like
>> tac_plus. Unwary new sysadmins always try start/stop it as root, causing
>> an unholy mess. Root the owns the log and pid files, when tac_plus drops
>> privs it can't record it's state so continues to service requests but
>> fails to log any of them. For an auth daemon, that's a serious issue.
>
> Shouldn't sysadmins use the init-scripts for that?
> If done correctly, permissions should not be an issue.
>
> Restarting services without keeping file ownership into account will
> always cause issues. Regardless of the init-system used.
>

That's just the thing though. As a sysadmin, how do you debug a service
that isn't starting to begin with? Let's say your new to the service. You're
not even sure if you got the config right the first time around. Or maybe
you're adjusting a setting somewhere, and you're confused why it
isn't taking effect.

All the /upstream documentation/, all the /man pages/, all the /usr/share/doc
stuff will tell you to start it _raw_. The init script obscures the
starting options,
environment variables, and sometimes even the running user from you. What are
you gonna do, play a human shell script parser? Nobody's perfect, do it
enough times and you're going to casually gloss over the line where
--safe-mode is appended to the string depending on the phase of
the moon...

If you're lucky, you've never had to start an unfamiliar service, or debug
someone else's unfamiliar config under time pressure...

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