4 Sep 2014 Stevey   » (Master)

systemd, a brave new world

After spending a while fighting with upstart, at work, I decided that systemd couldn't be any worse and yesterday morning upgraded one of my servers to run it.

I have two classes of servers:

  • Those that run standard daemons, with nothing special.
  • Those that run different services under runit
    • For example docker guests, node.js applications, and similar.

I thought it would be a fair test to upgrade one of each systems, to see how it worked.

The Debian wiki has instructions for installing Systemd, and both systems came up just fine.

Although I realize I should replace my current runit jobs with systemd units I didn't want to do that. So I wrote a systemd .service file to launch runit against /etc/service, as expected, and that was fine.

Docker was a special case. I wrote a docker.service + docker.socket file to launch the deamon, but when I wrote a graphite.service file to start a docker instance it kept on restarting, or failing to stop.

In short I couldn't use systemd to manage running a docker guest, but that was probably user-error. For the moment the docker-host has a shell script in root's home directory to launch the guest:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Run Graphite in a detached state.
#
/usr/bin/docker run -d -t -i -p 8080:80 -p 2003:2003 skxskx/graphite

Without getting into politics (ha), systemd installation seemed simple, resulted in a faster boot, and didn't cause me horrific problems. Yet.

ObRandom: Not sure how systemd is controlling prosody, for example. If I run the status command I can see it is using the legacy system:

root@chat ~ # systemctl status prosody.service 
prosody.service - LSB: Prosody XMPP Server
      Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/prosody)
      Active: active (running) since Wed, 03 Sep 2014 07:59:44 +0100; 18h ago
      CGroup: name=systemd:/system/prosody.service
          └ 942 lua5.1 /usr/bin/prosody

I've installed systemd and systemd-sysv, so I thought /etc/init.d was obsolete. I guess it is making pretend-services for things it doesn't know about (because obviously not all packages contain /lib/systemd/system entries), but I'm unsure how that works.

Syndicated 2014-09-04 01:47:33 from Steve Kemp's Blog

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!