Systemd and Fedora 14

Posted Aug 26, 2010 13:23 UTC (Thu) by csigler (subscriber, #1224)
In reply to: Systemd and Fedora 14 by nelljerram
Parent article: Systemd and Fedora 14

> Why? systemd is a system daemon, so it should
> be in /sbin, shouldn't it?

I'm getting old. A doc I found on FHS from 2004 says /sbin (and other sbin dirs) are for "system binaries," that is, "utilities used for system administration."

However, in the dark ages, the binaries in /sbin and similar were _statically_linked_ binaries (hence sbin). Why static? If something wonky happened to hose your system and you could only boot into a limited/single-user environment dymanic linking might not work, so any binaries needing to load .so files would fail to run. If your crucial system diagnostic and repair programs (like fsck) were dynamically linked, you're SOL.

Nowadays, we just boot from a system installation or utility disk to fix things (if they can be fixed). But there was a time before such CDs, or booting directly from an installation medium. Without those static binaries, you were sunk. Hello reinstallation and recovery from backups -- if you kept regularly updated backups....

Clemmitt

Systemd and Fedora 14

Posted Aug 26, 2010 20:54 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (1 responses)

No. /sbin (and /usr/sbin) was for system binaries, decreed Sun way way back. All in /bin and /sbin was statically linked, later it used only libraries in /lib. Remember /usr was where users used to live, and bin was just the "user" with all the nifty, non-essential, stuff in his $HOME...

Systemd and Fedora 14

Posted Sep 3, 2010 18:05 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

What? No, /usr was where the second 20Mb hard disk was added. :)

Systemd and Fedora 14

Posted Aug 26, 2010 21:36 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

As far as I'm concerned, *all* daemons should go somewhere outside $bindir; /usr/libexec, /usr/sbin, somewhere like that, *anywhere* other than /bin or /usr/bin, because those are *in the $PATH*. If a program is meant to be run entirely by another program, *why* is it somewhere where a user can run it by hand easily?

Systemd and Fedora 14

Posted Aug 27, 2010 7:53 UTC (Fri) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link] (1 responses)

dhcpd -t

Therefore it is clearly not meant to be ran by only a program, so it needs to live in /sbin not ?+/libexec

named -t too, I seem to recall?

Systemd and Fedora 14

Posted Sep 3, 2010 18:09 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Uh, nothing I said stated that programs that are meant to be run by sysadmins should *not* reside in sbin/. a->b -/> b->a, y'know.