4 ms·

Systemd is a double edged sword. I started using FreeBSD in 1999, and Mandrake Linux in 2000ish. I switched to gentoo when it came out, because i like to tink

Systemd is a double edged sword. I started using FreeBSD in 1999, and Mandrake Linux in 2000ish. I switched to gentoo when it came out, because i like to tinker and see how things work (like or hate the distro it does make you learn a quite a bit). Fast forward to 2018 and i manage around 500 Redhat servers here. About 150 are at RHEL7 (the others need to be upgraded). So learning systemd is a requirement, it is not going away. I like some points of it. I do like the jounrnalctl command and the ease of looking at logs, however being the hypocrite i am i despise the binary logs and non compatibility with most syslogging devices (i have had to explain lost logs during an audit with systemd and it was not pleasant). From a end user standpoint systemd is great for my desktop. For the servers it is functional, server boot time does not matter to most administrators. On VM's both boot fast enough, on bare metal....some of our large servers take 5 to 7 minutes to post (thanks HP) so the OS taking 20 to 30 seconds longer to boot is not a big deal. I follow the systemd mailing list to see what is going on, i think if the guys over there were not as abrasive in some of their answers things would be smoother, and more receptive to the needs of some of the users. I see a lot of features that are desktop specific and that seems to be where their development lies for the most part, desktops and servers are two different beasts. I guess the infighting just sucks, i am not a fan of systemd simply because i like a simple OS with minimal features to accomplish my objectives, however it is here to stay and i am a Linux Admin so it is part of my job and i learned to use it and keep up with development. I still use FreeBSD for all my home servers (except my docker swarm), old habits die hard.

devmunchies 8y ago
Speaking of BSD and Docker... I'm learning FreeBSD for a little side-project but it seams its harder to get a good deterministic deployment pipeline with Jails than with Docker. Whats the best practice there? I don't develop on FreeBSD either, its just for prod.
- siffland 8y ago
  Unfortunately there is not really one. I always treated jails as VM's. You could create the jails on ZFS and do a send and receive, or use something like Jenkins to build and deploy. However jails are like LXC on Linux, not like docker. You could use nanoBSD in the source tree to create a minimal mostly immutable image with your application. It will still be like a VM though and need deployed somewhere (this is how i run my DNS servers at home, they are about 120MB each and can run on pretty much any VM host (or bare metal)). But docker does have that market better (hence why i have a small swarm at home to play on). There is also docker for FreeBSD, still in testing but works pretty good it you build your own native images. I build a memcached image and was running that for a while.
smallbigfish 8y ago
> i have had to explain lost logs during an audit How did they get lost?
- siffland 8y ago
  Somehow during a system crash (hardware failure) the journal logs were corrupt and could not be read, and application logging was not being forwarded to the syslog facility. Our logs were not send to a logging server at the time, they were backed up daily and stored on tape.
justinclift 8y ago
> large servers take 5 to 7 minutes to post (thanks HP) IBM/Lenovo xSeries servers are the same. 5+ minutes to get through the boot process, due to all the hardware init and checking. That's with UEFI too. ;)

devmunchies 8y ago

Speaking of BSD and Docker... I'm learning FreeBSD for a little side-project but it seams its harder to get a good deterministic deployment pipeline with Jails than with Docker. Whats the best practice there? I don't develop on FreeBSD either, its just for prod.

siffland 8y ago
Unfortunately there is not really one. I always treated jails as VM's. You could create the jails on ZFS and do a send and receive, or use something like Jenkins to build and deploy. However jails are like LXC on Linux, not like docker. You could use nanoBSD in the source tree to create a minimal mostly immutable image with your application. It will still be like a VM though and need deployed somewhere (this is how i run my DNS servers at home, they are about 120MB each and can run on pretty much any VM host (or bare metal)). But docker does have that market better (hence why i have a small swarm at home to play on). There is also docker for FreeBSD, still in testing but works pretty good it you build your own native images. I build a memcached image and was running that for a while.

smallbigfish 8y ago

> i have had to explain lost logs during an audit How did they get lost?

siffland 8y ago
Somehow during a system crash (hardware failure) the journal logs were corrupt and could not be read, and application logging was not being forwarded to the syslog facility. Our logs were not send to a logging server at the time, they were backed up daily and stored on tape.

justinclift 8y ago

> large servers take 5 to 7 minutes to post (thanks HP) IBM/Lenovo xSeries servers are the same. 5+ minutes to get through the boot process, due to all the hardware init and checking. That's with UEFI too. ;)