Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:UNIX Philosophy (Score 1) 555

My point was simply to stress, that what the early Unix developers did was a reflection of the challenges they faced at the time, and that the lessons they learned reflects that. There are no dogmatic and universal Unix rules with a permanent truth value forever and in all ways of doing computing.

Nobody said there were, but you were completely misguided. Piping is a key feature of Unix, and nobody would suggest removing it today. The key principles of Unix are not "to be obeyed" simply because they are rules that you are meant to follow. They are principles that emerged from development (like piping) which became a "way" that people follow because they make sense.

No. Maybe the log file implementation, but they didn't even get that right. An error in the file means the whole thing is useless.

Of course not. Just because a daemon died before finishing its log entry doesn't mean the log file can't be read. journalctl is quite good at dealing with such corruptions.

If moving the goalposts is the best that you can accomplish, then surely we cannot progress this conversation past this point. There are many things which can happen to a log file besides truncation.

Also, binary logs are just plain wrongheaded, period, end of story, if they are not in a format which common tools can already read.

Not a problem; all the standard Linux text tools like "grep" and "tee" work great together with journalctl through the basic concept of piping.

They don't work without journalctl. And this is relevant because text logging (which does work without journalctl) is a second-class citizen to the binary logging. This is the part of the binary logging which is completely unacceptable. If only one of the logs is going to be accurate, it must be the log which I can read without special tools. Indeed, with a filesystem debugger or even a filesystem editor, if necessary.

It is a very Unix way of dealing with such "problems".

False. You only say that because you do not understand the Unix Way, which includes preference for flat and human-readable files. You are praising one particular tree while cutting down the forest.

Not having the right tools in the box is simply a shameful thing for a paid SysAdmin.

In the real world, where things sometimes do not go according to plan, it does not make sense to tie myself to proprietary tools. This point has been proven time and again, again, in the real world. Your coulda woulda shoulda nonsense is just that; journald coulda woulda shoulda made text logging as important as binary logging, and then the chief objection to it would not even exist. But arrogance has led its development otherwise. Presumably this will be fixed and eventually, with some snarky bullshit comments about how it's for the fogeys thrown in as a means of avoiding any personal responsibility for the bad decision in the first place.

It is so trivial to read and analyze journal log files on other computers or through a boot media.

I find your lack of imagination typical, but disturbing. It is, of course, the mindset which led to systemd, so I am anything but surprised to see it here.

Comment Re:good (Score 1) 331

A better example of how effective armed citizens are against the government would be Waco, but that doesn't support your point.

The particular citizens of Waco we're discussing decided not to resist when the FBI rolled in with tanks and flamethrowers. Then the FBI parked a tank on the escape hatch and set the building on fire with a flamethrower. This was mounted on another tank, clearly visible in the only decent footage of the incident, shot at long range because the FBI wouldn't permit the press anywhere near. They knew where the hatch was because they had advance information, and they had the complete plans of the facility. This led to the suffocation death of the people we're talking about. If this is an example of anything, it's an example of a time when armed defense was warranted, and an example of what will happen to you if you concentrate yourself.

Comment Re:good (Score 1) 331

You are an idiot if you think that the North Vietnamese citizenry defeated the US war machine without serious superpower backing of their own.

Who says that American insurgents couldn't get some backing? The proliferation of weapons across the country is meant to make taking the citizenry expensive, not impossible. But people want to claim otherwise to support the assertion that taking away the guns makes sense if the purpose of the second amendment is a hedge against tyranny.

I don't think the founders ever foresaw the development of world-destroying weapons. But then, I doubt they would have seen wisdom in their construction.

Comment Re:This could be really good for Debian (Score 1) 555

I just gave you an example, and you ask for examples? What are you, stupid?

Your problem was not a problem with init. Systemd will not solve the problem where you need NFS to boot, and NFS shits itself because it is shit.

Give us an actual example where init itself caused you a problem, or admit that you're just making shit up so that you can justify new and shiny. You're calling me stupid for insisting that you provide an actual example of a failure of init when what you provided was an example of a failure of the networking setup which could have also occurred with systemd if you misconfigured it. Now, provide an actual example of a failure of init, or if this was somehow init's fault (did it really start two init scripts at once all on its lonesome, or did the first script exit before it was done?) then explain that, and don't just describe a problem with scripts (which could also happen by misconfiguring a unit file) or with a daemon. From your description, it sounds a lot more to me like a problem with your distribution's network setup system, whatever that looks like.

Comment Re:Doesn't anybody notice the operative word here? (Score 1) 475

That word isn't child, it isn't anime, it isn't pornography. It is computer.

And anyone who thinks about it for a moment and doesn't see this for what this is, class warfare

the majority of the world is walking around with computers in their pockets, there is no class warfare here, unless you had a point but were very far from it in your comment

Comment Re:Simpsons Movie? (Score 1) 475

I have to wonder how the judge draws the line between something like this conviction and, say, the Simpsons Movie, where Bart is rocking some full frontal on the big screen.

There's a difference, for sure -- one is funny and clearly a cartoon, whereas one sounds like it's purposefully sexualizing children.

right, but when people propose to ban virtual child porn because they argue that it promotes child abuse, they have to propose banning depictions like the one you mention, because that depiction could be used by someone for sexual gratification, and/or it could arouse those desires in them. Sure, it's a crude representation, but there are cruder ones on cave walls that we seem to be able to recognize.

Comment Re:Moral Imperialism (Score 1) 475

They want something different than the common-carriers rules, because it is "not like the phone system which used only one application."

Right, but that's actually a lie. It is exactly like the phone system which used only one application. In the case of the phone system that application was transmission of sound, and in the case of the internet system that application is transmission of packets. If you argue that these packets' different nature makes them fundamentally different applications, then you must also argue that carrying data on a modem call over the phone system is a fundamentally different application, and then you cannot state that the phone system used only one application. In fact, it had two, and yet they were treated exactly identically. That is, in fact, a strong argument in favor of net neutrality.

Comment Re: Moral Imperialism (Score 1) 475

The constitution is crystal clear about many things that the judges, in explicit violation of their oaths, have made mean something else entirely. Previous poster is quite correct. The experiment failed.

The experiment by a bunch of white male land owners, most of them slave owners, succeeded brilliantly. Its goal was to determine whether it was possible to use jingoism (nee patriotism) and bullshit to fool the subjects of rule into believing that they hold the reins of power. Guess who still runs the country? A bunch of white male land owners, who are now actually in charge of something superior to slavery for their purposes: corporatism. They buy the laws, and we follow the laws. They've criminalized homelessness, and used the government to buy over 25% of the nation's land for the purposes of their exploitation in the form of the Bureau of Land Management. Rather than homesteading it and handing it to private citizens, homesteading was suspended so that this land could be raped wholesale. It's allegedly held in our interest, but those who've tried to (for example) use some of it to build a thermal-solar plant found that it was only available for mining coal, drilling oil, running cattle on land which was deliberately deforested for that purpose and therefore preventing it from becoming reforested, and the like.

Comment Re:UNIX Philosophy (Score 3, Insightful) 555

Unix wasn't even born with the now basic concept of "piping", it was a development over time.

It was an extremely early development, introduced before Unix was introduced to the world at large. That's why it's described in the first edition of "The Unix Programming Environment". Describing piping as a johnny-come-lately feature of Unix is disingenuous.

The systemd developers really did their homework well when designing the systemd log implementation

No. Maybe the log file implementation, but they didn't even get that right. An error in the file means the whole thing is useless. Also, binary logs are just plain wrongheaded, period, end of story, if they are not in a format which common tools can already read. If you don't agree, then we can't agree. You simply don't understand the problem of trying to deal with potentially corrupt binary logs on another computer entirely, which is a real scenario. On occasion I have to resort to pulling the disk and slapping it into something else for analysis, and I shouldn't need special tools for that. I should be able to use anything lying around.

I'm not against also having binary logs, I can see the potential benefits. However, it makes no sense whatsoever to just chuck them into a bunch of loose files anyway. Doing that doesn't solve the organizational problem of having a bunch of files lying around. The same data that goes into the text logs should go into an RDBMS. Then I could really do something with the data. systemd's binary log files actually represent a failure in the form of a missed opportunity, and not a rational evolution.

Further, there's no reason why the logging daemon should be tied to the init daemon at all. If this init daemon is so wonderful, reliable, and good at starting processes in order, then it should be able to kick off any logging daemon, wait until it is running and accepting log messages, and then continue booting, perhaps after delivering the boot time log messages to the logging daemon. Want to argue that we need a new syslogd with binary logging? Fine. But where's the argument that it should be married to init?

Slashdot Top Deals

Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.

Working...