I feel like anyone who genuinely has a strong opinion on this and isn’t actively developing something related has too much time on their hands ricing their desktop and needs to get a job
As someone who’s not a developer at all and has been making a comic about systemd for a rather small audience, it’s worse than you think: We actually have stuff to do and procrastinate on them while spending time and thoughts in this, reading old blog posts and forum debates as if deciphering Sumerian epic poems.
Many pages were made while I was supposed to be preparing for exams, which I barely passed. Others when I should’ve been cleaning up for moving. I think part of the reason why I haven’t made any in a while is that with a faithful audience being born and waiting for the next chapter, it’s started feeling like something I had to do, and therefore, the type of stuff I procrastinate on.
My full-time job literally involves dealing with systemd’s crap. There is a raspberry pi that controls all of our signage. Every time it is powered on, systemd gets stuck because it’s trying to mount two separate partitions to the same mount point, whereupon I have to take a keyboard and a ladder, climb up the ceiling, plug in the keyboard, and press Enter to get it to boot. I’ve tried fixing it, but all I did was break it more.
Uh… Sounds like it’s not really system’s fault, your setup is just terrible.
I don’t know his specific issue, but the general behavior of systemd going completely nuts when something is a bit ‘off’ in some fashion that is supremely confusing. Sure, there’s a ‘mistake’, but good luck figuring out what that mistake is. It’s just systemd code tends to be awfully picky in obscure ways.
Then when someone comes along with a change to tolerate or at least provide a more informative error when some “mistake” has been made is frequently met with “no, there’s no sane world where a user should be in that position, so we aren’t going to help them out of that” or “that application does not comply with standard X”, where X is some standard the application developer would have no reason to know exists, and is just something the systemd guys latched onto.
See the magical privilege escalation where a user beginning with a number got auto-privileges, and Pottering fought fixing it because “usernames should never begin with a number anyway”.
If it has a buffer overflow exploit that caused it to execute arbitrary code is his response that people shouldn’t be sending that much data into that port anyway so we’re not going to fix it?
(I feel like this shouldn’t require a /s but I’m throwing it in anyway)
I’m gonna laugh if it’s something as simple as a botched fstab config.
In the past, it’s usually been the case that the more ignorant I am about the computer system, the stronger my opinions are.
When I first started trying out Linux, I was pissed at it and would regularly rant to anyone who would listen. All because my laptop wouldn’t properly sleep: it would turn off, then in a few minutes come back on; turns out the WiFi card had a power setting that was causing it to wake the computer up from sleep.
After a year of avoiding the laptop, a friend who was visiting from out of town and uses Arch btw took one look at it, diagnosed and fixed it in minutes. I felt like a jackass for blaming the linux world for intel’s non-free WiFi driver being shit. (in my defense, I had never needed to toggle this setting when the laptop was originally running Windows).
The worst part is that I’m a sysadmin, diagnosing and fixing computer problems should be my specialty. Instead I failed to put in the minimum amount of effort and just wrote the entire thing off as a lost cause. Easier then questioning my own infallibility, I suppose.
A typo in fstab shouldn’t wreck the system. Why is that not resilient ? I added an extra mount point to an empty partition but forgot to actually create it in LVM.
During boot, device not found and boot halted, on a computer with no monitor/keyboard
It will cause a critical error during boot if the device isn’t given the nofail mount option, which is not included in the defaults option, and then fails to mount. For more details, look in the fstab(5) man page, and for even more detail, the mount(8) man page.
Found that out for myself when not having my external harddrive enclosure turned on with a formatted drive in it caused the pc to boot into recovery mode (it was not the primary drive). I had just copy-pasted the options from my root partition, thinking I could take the shortcut instead of reading documentation.
There’s probably other ways that a borked fstab can cause a fail to boot, but that’s just the one I know of from experience.
Its a ‘failsafe’ , like if part of the system depends on that drive mounting then if it fails then don’t continue. Not the expected default, but probably made sense at some point.
Like if brakes are broken don’t allow starting truck, type failsafe.
Yea like the default is smart? How is it supposed to know if that’s critical or not at that point? The alternative is for it to silently fail and wait for something else to break instead of failing gracefully? I feel like I’m growing more and more petty and matching the language of systemd haters but like just think about it for a few minutes???
As someone who has strong opinions on this, and not only has a job but has a job related to exactly sort of thing… We use freebsd.
Specifically to avoid shit like systemd, and other questionable choices forced down people’s throats by idiots who can’t stop touching things that work well because they didn’t invent it.
I feel like anyone who genuinely has a strong opinion on this and isn’t actively developing something related has too much time on their hands ricing their desktop and needs to get a job
As someone who’s not a developer at all and has been making a comic about systemd for a rather small audience, it’s worse than you think: We actually have stuff to do and procrastinate on them while spending time and thoughts in this, reading old blog posts and forum debates as if deciphering Sumerian epic poems. Many pages were made while I was supposed to be preparing for exams, which I barely passed. Others when I should’ve been cleaning up for moving. I think part of the reason why I haven’t made any in a while is that with a faithful audience being born and waiting for the next chapter, it’s started feeling like something I had to do, and therefore, the type of stuff I procrastinate on.
Congratulations on passing your exams! Hang in there. 🙂
Thank you! This year’s even harder, but I’m hanging on!
Congrats on passing the exams!
Thank you!
😁 It is a fun comic
Thank you!
My full-time job literally involves dealing with systemd’s crap. There is a raspberry pi that controls all of our signage. Every time it is powered on, systemd gets stuck because it’s trying to mount two separate partitions to the same mount point, whereupon I have to take a keyboard and a ladder, climb up the ceiling, plug in the keyboard, and press Enter to get it to boot. I’ve tried fixing it, but all I did was break it more.
Uh… Sounds like it’s not really systemd’s fault, your setup is just terrible.
If you’re unable to fix it, maybe get somebody else? Like, this doesn’t sound like it’s an unfixable issue…
I don’t know his specific issue, but the general behavior of systemd going completely nuts when something is a bit ‘off’ in some fashion that is supremely confusing. Sure, there’s a ‘mistake’, but good luck figuring out what that mistake is. It’s just systemd code tends to be awfully picky in obscure ways.
Then when someone comes along with a change to tolerate or at least provide a more informative error when some “mistake” has been made is frequently met with “no, there’s no sane world where a user should be in that position, so we aren’t going to help them out of that” or “that application does not comply with standard X”, where X is some standard the application developer would have no reason to know exists, and is just something the systemd guys latched onto.
See the magical privilege escalation where a user beginning with a number got auto-privileges, and Pottering fought fixing it because “usernames should never begin with a number anyway”.
I love that mentality to development
If it has a buffer overflow exploit that caused it to execute arbitrary code is his response that people shouldn’t be sending that much data into that port anyway so we’re not going to fix it?
(I feel like this shouldn’t require a /s but I’m throwing it in anyway)
Curious, how does changing one of them to a different mount point make things worse?
I’m gonna laugh if it’s something as simple as a botched fstab config.
In the past, it’s usually been the case that the more ignorant I am about the computer system, the stronger my opinions are.
When I first started trying out Linux, I was pissed at it and would regularly rant to anyone who would listen. All because my laptop wouldn’t properly sleep: it would turn off, then in a few minutes come back on; turns out the WiFi card had a power setting that was causing it to wake the computer up from sleep.
After a year of avoiding the laptop, a friend who was visiting from out of town and uses Arch btw took one look at it, diagnosed and fixed it in minutes. I felt like a jackass for blaming the linux world for intel’s non-free WiFi driver being shit. (in my defense, I had never needed to toggle this setting when the laptop was originally running Windows).
The worst part is that I’m a sysadmin, diagnosing and fixing computer problems should be my specialty. Instead I failed to put in the minimum amount of effort and just wrote the entire thing off as a lost cause. Easier then questioning my own infallibility, I suppose.
Does indeed sound likely to be an fstab issue, unless system services are being used in a really weird way.
A typo in fstab shouldn’t wreck the system. Why is that not resilient ? I added an extra mount point to an empty partition but forgot to actually create it in LVM.
During boot, device not found and boot halted, on a computer with no monitor/keyboard
It will cause a critical error during boot if the device isn’t given the
nofailmount option, which is not included in thedefaultsoption, and then fails to mount. For more details, look in thefstab(5)man page, and for even more detail, themount(8)man page.Found that out for myself when not having my external harddrive enclosure turned on with a formatted drive in it caused the pc to boot into recovery mode (it was not the primary drive). I had just copy-pasted the options from my root partition, thinking I could take the shortcut instead of reading documentation.
There’s probably other ways that a borked fstab can cause a fail to boot, but that’s just the one I know of from experience.
Cool ! The default should smarter than bork by default.
Its a ‘failsafe’ , like if part of the system depends on that drive mounting then if it fails then don’t continue. Not the expected default, but probably made sense at some point. Like if brakes are broken don’t allow starting truck, type failsafe.
Yea like the default is smart? How is it supposed to know if that’s critical or not at that point? The alternative is for it to silently fail and wait for something else to break instead of failing gracefully? I feel like I’m growing more and more petty and matching the language of systemd haters but like just think about it for a few minutes???
can you get something besides a pi?
As someone who has strong opinions on this, and not only has a job but has a job related to exactly sort of thing… We use freebsd.
Specifically to avoid shit like systemd, and other questionable choices forced down people’s throats by idiots who can’t stop touching things that work well because they didn’t invent it.
What do you use freebsd for? Server or clients and what kind of workload?
Servers, and workloads are various- DNS, ntp, databases, a few websites, internal servers running code/apis/etc for internal processes, etc.