[HN Gopher] The history (sort of) of service management in Unix
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The history (sort of) of service management in Unix
        
       Author : zdw
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2022-02-21 17:01 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (utcc.utoronto.ca)
 (TXT) w3m dump (utcc.utoronto.ca)
        
       | chasil wrote:
       | SysV init has the ability to "respawn" a single PID, which I have
       | used in the past (principally, replacing HP ServiceGuard
       | clustering):
       | 
       | xy:3:respawn:/usr/bin/return_to_life
       | 
       | If the above process exits to much, the syslog will record
       | "return to life respawning too quickly; disabled for 5 minutes."
       | 
       | This is all much more pleasant in systemd, which can understand
       | and restart a whole group of processes, even when the parent
       | process exits in the course of startup.
        
       | cryptonector wrote:
       | I strongly disagree that SMF wasn't a good system. I agree that
       | some aspects of its UI weren't good, and that since in the
       | beginning the Greenline team didn't model shutdown dependencies,
       | shutdown for a long time wasn't fast. But the fundamentals of SMF
       | were and remain solid, and they're really not that different from
       | launchd and systemd, but predated systemd by a lot:
       | - services as defined in some declarative         language (XML,
       | which isn't great is is what         was reasonable in 2005)
       | - services are imported into a database         (SQLite2, because
       | at the time SQLite3 was         barely in existence)            -
       | distinguish persistent and temporary         disabling of
       | services (same as Windows)            - restarter takes care of
       | everything (no more         accidental inheritance of wrong
       | environ when         restarted by hand)            - process
       | contracts (in Linux: cgroups) as a         process grouping
       | mechanism that allows related         service processes to be
       | monitored and killed         together            - link to FMA
       | (fault management)
       | 
       | Looking at TFA's opinions, I found this:
       | https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/BashLocaleScr...
       | -- but is it Bash or is it libc? Because I think it's libc. And
       | yes, it's awful. But we have to place fault at the right feet.
       | Just as with TFA's opinion about SMF, where IMO it's important to
       | characterize the issues correctly.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-02-21 23:01 UTC)