A backdoor in xz [LWN.net]

A backdoor in xz

Posted Mar 30, 2024 14:29 UTC (Sat) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
In reply to: A backdoor in xz by DimeCadmium
Parent article: A backdoor in xz

One does not exclude the other. In fact many of my monitoring scripts actively check that the service in question hasn't legitimately been shut down before complaining (too) loudly.

You cannot do a "has legitimately been shut down" check without systemd. (Well, OK, of course I could use or write some other code that does this job, but why would I want to replace one mostly-coherent, widely-used presumed-safe software package with five less-widely-used and poorly-integrated ones? sysV init scripts are of no help here)

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A backdoor in xz

Posted Mar 31, 2024 1:33 UTC (Sun) by DimeCadmium (subscriber, #157243) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes you can? OpenRC has done it for longer than systemd has existed ffs

A backdoor in xz

Posted Apr 1, 2024 14:06 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

I used OpenRC before I used systemd; it does not, as far as I can find (and even today) offer a proper lifecycle check; in particular, the only queries you can ask it are "is this service running", "is this service known and shut down", or "has this service crashed", whereas systemd adds "is this service running but in the process of shutting down" and "is this service running but in the process of restarting" to that list, which is essential for automated remediation of faults - you know that if a service is restarting, a fault is OK, while if a service is shutting down, you should determine if that shutdown is expected, or if you need to alert a human.