Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part IX [LWN.net]

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part IX

Posted Jul 22, 2011 0:49 UTC (Fri) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446)
In reply to: Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part IX by cjcox
Parent article: Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part IX

"[invalid assumption of why things were done]" - Citation needed!

LP really has designed a better mousetrap which will replace a core component of our system which has seriously overrun its sell by date.

He may have an approach to evangelizing his solution that grates with you but why is that a problem?

I personally find some of his posts a bit different but then English is his {n:n[element](2...)}th language.

Overall I think that he has provided high quality "titillation" documentation and articles in the popular press. Just because you don't like the tone, you can't fault the solution.

Upstart pointed the way but systemd has clearly been designed from first principles with a clear(ish) mind.

I look forward to seeing it running on a Gentoo near me. Ah, it does.

Oh, sorry, nearly forgot to ask - do you have anything better to offer?

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Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part IX

Posted Jul 25, 2011 11:05 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>I like systemd. I like pulseaudio. I liked avahi.

I realise this is offtopic but since you use avahi I wonder if you could give me some idea of what it's actually for. It's one of those random daemons that get installed automatically on new Linux installs but doesn't seem to do anything, and reading the wikipedia page leaves me none the wiser.

I gather it's only of relevance if you have a network which doesn't have a router doing DHCP and DNS, but you still want local name resolution; it that correct? Certainly I've always removed it with no problems - discovery of other machines and file shares still works fine.

With PulseAudio I've worked out that it's useful if one or more of the following cases applies:
* You want to hotplug audio devices frequently and have the appropriate one chosen automatically
* You want per-application volume controls for applications that don't have their own volume setting
* You want to be able to transfer a running audio stream between devices.
None of these apply to me which is why it seemed useless to me for ages and I couldn't figure out why anyone might want it.

Is there a similar list of cases in which one might want to use avahi?

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part IX

Posted Jul 26, 2011 5:40 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

> I gather it's only of relevance if you have a network which doesn't have a router doing DHCP and DNS, but you still want local name resolution; it that correct?

It does two things. For people without DHCP, it lets you allocate a unique IP address amongst your local peers.

Second, it lets you discover both hostnames and services on the local network. For instance, "find a printer on the local network" becomes very easy.

Some printers, multimedia, and chat services use it for local networks. Even if DHCP and DNS are enabled.

If you aren't using any of those services and never have a need of building an ad-hoc network, you probably don't need it running.

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part IX

Posted Jul 26, 2011 10:28 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>If you aren't using any of those services and never have a need of building an ad-hoc network, you probably don't need it running.

Great, thanks!

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part IX

Posted Jul 28, 2011 7:07 UTC (Thu) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]

This is the word. That person has made my life noticeably easier now.

Once systemd gets into RHEL, I won't have to spend late nights working around random flaws and race conditions in horribly broken daemon startup scripts (anyone noticed that in a few mainstream languages you can't even get your pid to write into a file, change effective uid and daemonize?) and I may finally get a life.