Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part VIII

Posted Apr 21, 2011 14:56 UTC (Thu) by gurulabs (subscriber, #10753)
Parent article: Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part VIII

Yes! I fully support for this effort.

As a Linux training company that covers multiple distributions I'm well aware of NEEDLESS frivolous Linux incompatibilities. These incompatibilities are extra noise that hurt the learner, bloat the books, bloat our multi distro troublshooting tools, and need not exist.

Besides configuration files in /etc, does it make sense to have common binaries in different locations or named differently?

Examples:

Debian : /bin/netcat
RH : /usr/bin/nc
SUSE : /usr/bin/netcat

Debian/RH : /bin/sed
SUSE : /usr/bin/sed

Debian/RH : /bin/grep
SUSE : /usr/bin/grep

DEB/USE : /usr/bin/ex
RH : /bin/ex

Debian/RH : /sbin/iptables
SUSE : /usr/sbin/iptables

Debian : /usr/bin/basename
RH/SUSE : /bin/basename

Hopefully when GRUB 2 is finally released/adopted widely all distros will use grub.cfg instead of the grub.conf/menu.lst frivolous incompatibility.

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part VIII

Posted Apr 21, 2011 15:09 UTC (Thu) by Aissen (subscriber, #59976) [Link] (2 responses)

Debian : /bin/netcat
RH : /usr/bin/nc
SUSE : /usr/bin/netcat

Do you mean netcat-traditional or netcat-openbsd ? Because AFAIK Debian ships the former as the default netcat, while Fedora ships the latter And they have incompatible options/behavior like the "-w" and "-q" switches.

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part VIII

Posted Apr 21, 2011 15:45 UTC (Thu) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link] (1 responses)

You soooo beat me to pointing that out. +1 for pedanticism

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part VIII

Posted Apr 21, 2011 16:07 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

Pedantry, actually. :-)

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part VIII

Posted Apr 21, 2011 15:40 UTC (Thu) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link]

SUSE : /usr/bin/sed
SUSE : /usr/bin/grep

Uh, on my SuSE-based boxen (SLES 10, don't ask) those binaries live in /bin, and /usr/bin merely has redundant symlinks to the /bin copies.

Also, I'm pretty sure having those in /bin is required by POSIX & FHS as they must be present at system boot, possibly before /usr is mounted. (Broken separate /usr notwithstanding - let's not go there again!)

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part VIII

Posted Apr 21, 2011 15:40 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (4 responses)

> Hopefully when GRUB 2 is finally released/adopted widely all distros will use grub.cfg instead of the grub.conf/menu.lst frivolous incompatibility.

What I would like to see is for GRUB is per-install configuration files. Ubuntu manages ubuntu-sda1.conf, Fedora manages fedora-sda2.conf, a different Fedora install manages fedora-sda3.conf. There would be an base grub.conf file which would be used to manage defaults and such.

Currently (IME), dual booting a distro against itself causes them both to get confused as to which is actually setting defaults and managing entries in grub.conf. Besides the fact that if one dual boots Ubuntu with Fedora, which one wins with the formatting? I know Ubuntu does some crazy magic comment lines to help with this.

Unless there is a standard set of tools for managing the configuration file (removing kernel entries when they're uninstalled, adding new entries, etc.), distros will tend to try and make grub.conf look like what makes it easier for their own tools. Maybe grub.cfg will fix this (just skimmed the wiki page), but it looks as if it will have similar issues.

Should probably put this to the GRUB developers.

Grub stuff

Posted Apr 21, 2011 16:19 UTC (Thu) by utoddl (guest, #1232) [Link] (2 responses)

I finally made an out-of-distro grub install on each of my boxes. All it does is let you pick which distro's grub you want to chainload. This way each distro can do whatever it wants with it's own grub. I add a "return to master bootmenu" to each, and I haven't looked back. Very much worth the trouble, and not really that much trouble to start with.

Grub stuff

Posted Apr 21, 2011 17:58 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

That does sound a lot nicer. I'll have to remember this when I set up new boxes. Thanks.

Grub stuff

Posted May 3, 2011 13:40 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

This sounds awesome. How does one set up an out-of-distro grub? Google turns up nothing.

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part VIII

Posted Apr 23, 2011 16:15 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I dual boot gentoo and SuSE.

SuSE uses some fancy commenting too - it knows what I added for gentoo and doesn't touch it.

But again, I can imagine it getting thoroughly confused if I tried to run two different SuSEs.

Cheers,
Wol

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part VIII

Posted Apr 21, 2011 15:50 UTC (Thu) by stumbles (guest, #8796) [Link] (2 responses)

Well there is this netcat; http://netcat.sf.net/netcat-0.7.1.tar.gz

which installs two commands; "nc" and "netcat".

and then there is this one;

http://coast.cs.purdue.edu/pub/tools/unix/netutils/netcat/nc-110.tgz

and uses the command "nc".

So I guess when the name collisions are fixed there would be no need for shoving "nc" into different directories when you have nc and netcat installed.

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part VIII

Posted Apr 22, 2011 9:33 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (1 responses)

And then there is socat which can do a lot more, so why are we still talking about netcat...

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part VIII

Posted Apr 22, 2011 14:18 UTC (Fri) by janfrode (subscriber, #244) [Link]

.. and of course ncat from nmap -> http://nmap.org/ncat/

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part VIII

Posted Apr 24, 2011 9:53 UTC (Sun) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link] (1 responses)

Aim higher! We should be getting rid of the / and /usr split altogether. An initramfs is now perfectly capable of bootstrapping complex root filesystems (encrypted, remote, raid, etc); there is no need to separate "minimal userland necessary for booting" in / and "big userland" in /usr.

Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part VIII

Posted May 5, 2011 22:33 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I thought one of the points of /usr (and one of the reasons why a read-only /usr is important) is that they want to be able to share it across systems.

If it *has* to be a network mount, in order to share it, I presume getting rid of it isn't as easy as it looks :-)

Cheers,
Wol