Welcome to traditional BSD partition tables... Dedicated /var/log partitions ftw.

> "It's readily apparent you haven't even used Fedora in years."

Actually, I've been grumbling about it since Fedora 15, but I just never gave up grumbling about it because I am forced to use it for my work. I currently run F20 on a workstation for managing various systems both in the cloud and managed in a local series of VMWare clusters. I use Fedora because it helps me maintain a step ahead of the stuff coming "down the pipe" to Redhat.

> "but at least for enterprise distros like RHEL, standard syslogs are pretty much required"

Rsyslog is quite literally the ONLY reason several of my customers can even run RHEL7... It's amazing how many Developers/Engineers/Admins base their scripts, reports, monitoring and other functions off of log output.

In the end, I am just waiting for the market to "speak" as to whether they accept RHEL7... I am required to give it a year to know for sure. If I had my way though, I'd go back to Slackware or FreeBSD, but that's not my sole choice. As a closing, fvck deps... that is what I feel about anything from 0pointer.

> "While it's not impossible for journald'd logs to get corrupted, it's no more likely than most other files in the filesystem."

*cough* BULLSHIT! *cough*

- Laptop failure to resume from suspend = corrupted logs
- Power loss or hard off on systems = corrupted logs
- Too long a log retention = corrupted logs

From an amazon cloud server running RHEL7 last couple of weeks:
File corruption detected at /var/log/journal/2dd5724e1e1542fc9a4aa75nov26cc150/system@f0282a3cd24344648a0bbe3a801ead66-000000000001b5d4-0004cfd1dbb89d83.journal:191117416 (of 233118464, 82%).

journalctl absolutely needs to be improved to handle corrupt logs better... maybe something to repair them instead of switching to "clean" them?
 

Hurray! More 0pointer dependencies that need rpm -e --nodeps on!

If it weren't for stable RHEL6.X and XFCE, I'd have dumped Fedora back in version 15, but this latest version 21 (codename /dev/null ) is really making me contemplate it again.

Anyone got a suggestion for a distro without so much dep crap?

Sounds like the Redhat/Fedora boys...

It's my understanding that the app maintainers do not want to maintain both initd and systemd compatibility at the same time... Extra work for little reward.

I, like many other sysadmins out there who do some level of coding to maintain large swaths of servers dislike the change to systemd on the premise that this wasn't a "phased" implementation. The rebuttal on the systemd camp is that it cannot be phased in and too bad, so you have to rewrite a few scripts and make a "few" changes to your administration processes. They do not realize it is more than just a few changes for many though and I think that's where much of the anger lay boiling... lack of empathy on either side.

Everything in this article is based on presumption and speculation.

They did that once already in the UK back in 1997... Still washing up to this day

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...

Pfft... I just use webferret from 1997, it bundles up all those fancy search engines into one!

I am not a security adviser, so I cannot say for sure which ones they were referring to and the only info they gave me was a list of about 13 x US-CERN, NVD and Canonical advisories regarding the exploitation of systemd through various methods. These were not noted as "fixed" either and 4 are listed as "Medium".

That list was FROM Redhat, not a troll of any kind... just a list. Sheesh.

We dropped $2.2M on 2 half populated IBM Power 7 780's (redundant VIOS with IBM's tailored 42U cabinets) in 2012 and are running approximately 239 AIX 6+ & 7.1 LPARs for many of our Financial and Business Continuity Applications. LPAR isn't quite as advanced as VMWare, but it is getting there (no more stupid 4 lines of lpar commands for simple resource management/adjustment). Compared to what we spent on the p5 series years ago, we paid 40% less for our Power 7's. Power system prices have come down A LOT over the last 3 years though and I would professionally recommend checking them out if you need some SystemV style stability.

Anyway, we WERE hoping to move away from AIX to RHEL so we did not need to have two separate UNIX SysAdmin groups, but RHEL7 kinda threw that out the window for us sadly. Personally, I am less bemoaning of systemd than I am over the plethora of other MANDATORY changes they decided to dump on the customer all at once. It affects me and my team directly whereas the systemd thing effects my vendors and their applications.

A lot of what I listed was directly from the RHEL Customer Portal article and it was intended to illustrate the number of changes, but none with any particular order of importance or grief.

For my team, the grievances begin with the slurry of ctl command changes like (but not limited to the following off the top of my head):

rhn_register > subscription-manager
system-config-* > gnome-control-center (Who installs gnome on a server?!?!)
chkconfig/service/runlevel/init/shutdown/halt/inittab > systemctl
system-config-date > timedatectl
vi /var/log/ journalctl
parted > gdisk
ifconfig/network/hosts/dns/eth > nmcli
netstat > ss

And Apple Xservers were SUCH great performers... /sarcasm

>>So, what alternative are you looking at?

Our vendors who have explicitly stated they will not support systemd in any way (due to +Priv, DoS and bypass issues/concerns) have stated that they recommend either staying with RHEL6 & Oracle Linux 6 until it is no longer supported or switching to AIX or FreeBSD. Two of these vendors are financial software suites, one is a Point of Sale system and the other is a CRM Suite that "may support it in the future". What the other vendors plan on recommending is still TBD for them. Simply put though, many companies are more invested in their applications than any flavor of *NIX.

>>I don't know about how you write scripts, but I find it amazing that a majority of them has to be rewritten.

Have you not seen the number of changes in management, monitoring & configuration commands made within RHEL7? Seriously, it borders on being a completely new distro the way everything has been retooled. Many of our SysAdmin scripts are written in Perl & Bash with remote get for everything from deployment to monitoring and analysis (netstat? gone. ifconfig? redirected. iptables? gone. lsof? switches changed. chkconfig? redirected. So many more...).