And now I'll have to learn how to use yet another arcane bolt-on to systemd. Bugger.

But does this have an equivalent? Or maybe it just users the suders file before deprecating it a few releases in the future.

This is what happens when no one says "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit."

It's the only way to be sure.

Yeah, but since Poettering now works for Microsoft, wouldn't doing that also run the risk of destroying the parts of the company responsible for developing Windows 11 and all those other MS products we know and...

On second thoughts, you pilot the ship and I'll get the nuke ready! ;-)

You're going to need a bigger nuke!

Can't we all just get along? Let's all get a nice easter egg for Lennart: There's this place on LV-426 where the floor is just full of them…

Now with 42% more attack surface.

TFTFY.

Ian Murdock (the Ian in DebIan) probably said something similar, before being taken out of the equation...

The jokes, they just write themselves don't they?

has an emacs function ?

We used to joke about emacs doing everything but did not foresee systemd.

Soon: systemd, without an OS kernel. Boot directly into systemd and all your applications will run as systemd. All applications are systemd. Systemd rules!

The origin story of the Borg!

You joke but it already has it's own text editor.

...all your applications will run as systemd.

Indeed. It just makes you wonder if systemd was really Poettering's audition to work at MS.

Not being au fait with things systemd (PCLinuxOS user here) does it have a Registry yet?

does it have a Registry yet?

Beat me to it. That's the answer to a previous posters question about the sudoers file.

Your system are belongd to us.

"Let's throw out the concept of SUID on the dump of UNIX' bad ideas."

For once I agree with him. Just use su.

su means I need to give out the root password and it also makes it harder to control access with SELinux.

With sudo you don't need to give anyone root password because their own password suffices if they're in the sudoers file. That means hat if their password has been obtained by somebody else - possibly because they reused it elsewhere - then there's no additional layer of protection. None. Whatever access they have through sudo is now open to that third person.

The only reason you should have to give out the root password is that you need to give someone access that can only be done by root. The original solution was that if someone's job was printer administration that was done by user lpadmin and they'd su to lpadmin using lpadmin's password, not root's. And you still needed a separate password to become root.

It was a poor solution to an already solved problem.

With sudo you don't need to give anyone root password because their own password suffices if they're in the sudoers file. That means hat if their password has been obtained by somebody else - possibly because they reused it elsewhere - then there's no additional layer of protection. None. Whatever access they have through sudo is now open to that third person.

Which is also true if they've been careless enough to lose the root password. That's a more likely scenario for someone who only occasionally has to use it, and so puts it on a post-it or similar. They are hopefully less likely to do that with their own password, which they use frequently enough to remember it.

The big advantage of tools like sudo is the audit trail. If someone logs in as root using the root password and commits mayhem, you have no idea who it was.

If, on the other hand, someone uses sudo to become root & cause trouble, you know who did it.

In any case, Poettering seems more to be referring to the concept of SUID, and the related setuid() function, which isn't the same thing as sudo. It's more often used to allow specific binaries to run with elevated privileges. He seems to be suggesting that instead of giving the binary itself the privilege (via what is essentially a filesystem permissions bit hack interpreted by the kernel), the user would "ask" systemd to run it with privilege. It's just more systemd empire-building, removing control from the kernel & putting it in systemd. As noted elsewhere, we're rapidly heading toward systemdOS, any day now he'll reinvent containers.

> any day now he'll reinvent containers.

You're talking as if `systemd-nspawn` isn't already one of the most widely-used container technologies with or without your knowledge: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-nspawn.html

Just use su.

Amen to that.

Have one on me.

[1]Some thoughts on PClinuxOS's take on Sudo

[1] https://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,90479.msg758079.html#msg758079

Use MFA with sudo.

The product I supported in my last job, BoKS, can do exactly that.

sudo su -

su is a suid binary, indeed it was possibly the first suid binary:

-r-sr-xr-x 1 root bin 17528 Jun 7 15:43 /usr/bin/su

I wish someone would dump systemd and Poettering somewhere away from Linux altogether.

"I wish someone would dump systemd and Poettering somewhere away from Linux altogether"

The perfect place would be the subantarctic Bouvet Island which very conveniently has no internet connection to anywhere else in the world.

Translation: Poettering knows he's never been- and never will be- popular among the Linux community, and has decided to go all-in on the smug troll route instead, doubling down on the entirely legitimate reasons he's disliked there and attempting to mock them for it.

It's not the sort of character trait that engenders trust and yet systemd required an enormous amount of trust.

[Author here]

> has decided to go all-in on the smug troll route instead

Do please note, this description is *not* from Lennart P himself.

It was from Luca Boccassi:

https://social.vivaldi.net/deck/@bluca@fosstodon.org/112600235620499886

https://github.com/bluca

https://salsa.debian.org/bluca

Thank you for the correction- though, to be fair, it was an understandable misinterpretation given that the quote in the article immediately preceded reference to "Lennart Poettering's announcement" itself.

Regardless, that sort of smug, triumphalist gloat coming from *anyone* in a high-ranking position within the project doesn't reflect well upon it or its attitude towards the community.

'Before any OpenVMS admirers get excited, no, Linux does not now support versions on files or directories.'

OpenVMS (ODS) never supported versions of directories. Only normal files. A directory file always has version 1.

Oswald

Pretty soon we'll be running GNU/systemd.

How can the rot be stopped?

By moving to Devuan or one of the other non-systemd Linices and if that really does become infeasible, move to a BSD.

Personally, I have been slowly sliding my servers over to OpenBSD for my mainline servers and OmniOS for my file servers.

I do still use Proxmox for my VM's, but I consider that more of an appliance.

By writing a better competitor that people WANT to use instead of having it forced on them.

The curmudgeons would say let's go back to SysV but then they'd probably also be happy making everyone sit in caves whilst rubbing two sticks together. Upstart was only a small improvement over SysV and that's not enough to make people take notice. A true future competitor must have some key advantage in order to make waves, and it needs to be significant waves to aler the course of SystemD's sea-swell.

Yes, I'm a curmudgeon and refute your comparison.

Maybe there is a better solution than Sys V but I found Upstart already a step in the wrong direction because it made a start-up problem impossible to diagnose. Possibly there was somewhere where some debugging could have been inserted but if so it was sufficiently obfuscated that I never found it. Clarity is a virtue to be valued.

I think systemd will do it to themselves.

It is growing. Virus-like. One day it will just grow too big and the cracks will show. The cracks will be exploited. Cracks will be papered over, exposing more cracks. Sort of like Windows.

At that point, systemd will be prime for disruption. I for one, will not be standing in the way of systemd shooting themselves in the foot.

Use a proper OS. For instance one of the BSDs.

We don't want SUID so let's move SUID over here and call it something else!

Around the corner... systemd-llama: "You don't need to do anything, we got this."

It really whips the llama's ass.

to port Solaris 10 (or OpenIndiana/illumos) SMF to Linux but the cure might be worse than the disease. ;)

I have no real idea what 42% less Unix philosophy actually means and I am not sure Poettering could enumerate those tenets of Unix philosophy the 42% doesn't now support.

Unix setuid has been a security nightmare but if you allow Linux capabilities you can get away with no suid binaries although cap_setuid is not much better. (Surprising how many scanning tools check setuid/setgid file perms but ignore file capabilities. ;)

Let's make everything easier to run as root sounds like something a Microsurf would say and want.

And if systemd is now going to take input from run0 there had better be a wall much bigger than used in World War Z built around it. Make that 3 of them.

I have a bad feeling about this.

... So do many things, poorly?

Long ago, it was said, "Those who don't understand Unix are bound to reinvent it, poorly".

Now we got Linux trying to reinvent Windows...poorly.

The current user base for Linux appear to be frustrated Windows users, hating Windows, but intent on recreating it. The leaders are afraid to say, "no, bad idea" to anyone's new code, no one gets recognized for improving existing code, they want to have their name on the replacement for something.

Let the downvoting begin...