libinit idea

[Nikolai Lifanov]

On 02/24/14 13:00, Don Lewis wrote:
> On 24 Feb, Thomas Mueller wrote:
>> from Don Lewis:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> This looks scandalously slow.  It reminds me of the time with OS/2
>> Warp 4 in the late 1990s when I had to close Netscape web browser in
>> preparation for shutdown, and it took 15 minutes because it was a hog
>> for memory, by late 1990s standards.  I had 20 MB RAM, not bad for
>> those days.
>>
>> What would happen if you typed at the command prompt
>> shutdown -r now
>> or
>> shutdown -p now
>> ?
>> Would it take seemingly forever?
> 
> In Linux-land "shutdown -h now" does what our "shutdown -p now" does.
> For whatever reason, doing shutdown that way seems faster.  That's not
> so handy for me in the power loss case because the machine is running X
> and is most likely sitting in the screensaver.  Switching to another
> vty, doing a root login, and typing in the shutdown command is a lot of
> typing to get right while flying blind without a monitor.
> 
> There might also be a slowdown due to the network being down, though
> it's hard to tell in my case.  I'm also not using NFS, which would be
> the obvious culprit.
> 
> I forgot to mention that the command line tools are feel cumbersome.  To
> restart a service:
> 	FreeBSD:   /etc/rc.d/foo restart
> 	Old Linux: /etc/init.d/foo restart
> 	Systemd:   systemctl restart foo.service
> seems worse that that when I'm actually typing it ...
> 

The Handbook-recommended invocation, which also works on linux, is
"service foo restart".

>> Would it take seemingly forever?
>>
>> I would like to try systemd in Linux, can't say at this stage whether
>> I'll like it, hate it, or somewhere in between.
> 
> There's no substitute for firsthand experience.
> 

- Nikolai Lifanov