libinit idea

[Don Lewis]

On 23 Feb, Lucius Rizzo wrote:
> * Andreas Nilsson <andrnils at gmail.com> [2014-02-23 09:33]:
>> Imho, the replacement to init and rc-scripts I sometimes think about
>> would be to import SMF from opensolaris/illumos. There one can at
>> least get the commands run and config used without looking at the
>> source code.
> 
> I like SMF from Solaris 11 onwards and even SmartOS. However, I have
> found to like systemd and use via systemctl on Arch far nicer than any
> other rc scripts to date. 
> 
> Anyone care to share their thoughts on the pros and cons of something
> like systemd the way Arch does?

I've got a Fedora server here that has systemd and I've come to dislike
it.  It seems to be one of those "Do not open.  No user serviceable
parts inside." sorts of things.

I was never able to get it to start NUT properly.

More often than not, it fails to come up multi-user.  The machine has a
large number of disks (mostly JFS and XFS) attached to it, and even
after what I think should be a clean shutdown, it seems to want to fsck
a bunch of them. Unfortunately, there seems to be some sort of timeout
on that, so a bunch get skipped and then don't get mounted.  I have to
manually fsck everything in single user mode.  Then if I reboot, it
*might* come up properly.  I haven't been able to find any knobs to
adjust the timeout.  Sometimes, there is just a message that says
something like "an error occurred" at the top of the screen, just before
the prompt for the single-user password, with no clue as to what it is
unhappy about.

Emergency shutdown can also be a problem.  If I'm around when the power
fails, I manually try to shut down the machine before the UPS battery
runs down.  I don't have the screen on the UPS, so I hit the power
button and cross my fingers that the machine will make it through the
clean shutdown sequence in time.  It seems to take forever (many
minutes) and I have no idea what the heck it is spending all of its time
on.

The documentation seems to be very sparse.

My plan is to migrate this function to a FreeBSD server.