Systemd wants to expand to include a sudo replacement

starman@programming.dev to Linux@lemmy.ml – 320 points –
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Systemd makes life easy. It also makes Linux more teachable. I like accessibility and don’t even mind this

hard disagree. life with plain text logs and daemon init scripts was so easy and nice. But we can't have nice things...

Those hacked together system-specific bash scripts were shit. Having a standard way of creating, starting, ensuring restarts,and logging services is so much better.

You can still get all the plain text logs you like.

Those hacked together system-specific bash scripts were shit.

With a different feature set per script as well. The systemd service files have often been pushed upstream.

Pretty sure people liking those scripts never really tried dealing with them across distributions. Though this just rehashes things that were said when distributions decided if to switch to systemd. Still the same strange claim that those scripts are somehow easier. It wasn't, it is also way easier to package a systemd file from upstream than to maintain that stuff within a distribution.

How do you get plain-text logs instead of the garbage binary format that journalctl forces on you?

Set ForwardToSyslog=yes in journald.conf and install a syslog daemon. Also optionally Storage=volatile (I wouldn't set Storage=none unless you want systemd to no longer show you any logs anywhere including in systemctl status because I assume it will do that)

Definitely reads like a Microsoft answer, seems so much easier than just reading text

By configuring journald to forward messages to syslog as is the default.

"forces on you" 🙄

Edit: Systemd has been around for 14 years. Did you never think to google this?

It's not the default fwiw. From journald.conf(5):

By default, only forwarding to wall is enabled.

You know what's nice? Being able to sit down at any Linux distro and being able to set up and configure services without Googling how to use that particular distro's init system.

But it's so unbearably slow.

Me when my computer that has a typical uptime of 37 days boots up in 7 seconds with systemd instead of 5.5 seconds with runit: 😡😡😡😡

I'm not on the systemd hate train by any means, but I don't understand how this is any improvement over pkexec

I don’t understand how this is any improvement over pkexec

That has the same problem as sudo: the SUID bit is set for it.

The fact that run0 uses polkit is more of a byproduct that this kinda authentication is already done with polkit all over the place in systemd. You can have individual subcommand accessible to different users (for example everyone can systemctl status, but systemctl reboot needs to be in the wheel group) which is why its generally used within systemd already. And it wouldn't surprise me if again you can do it with this as well, limiting what commands can unconditionally run, need prompt or are completely blocked.

I'm unclear from the documentation, does pkexec work under non-GUI contexts?

As long as you have polkit setup to work in terminal sessions, yes. This is pretty standard these days, though not particularly widely used.