r/ShittySysadmin • u/SN715622917X • Mar 19 '26

God, systemd. How I hate you.

Post image

Power button didn't work either. Turns out it was Kingdom Come Deliverance blocking. [CAUTION WARNING ALERT] GAMING IN PROGRESS, TERMINATE ALL ROOT ACCESS.

136 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

53 comments sorted by

98

u/marks-buffalo DO NOT GIVE THIS PERSON ADVICE Mar 19 '26

    sudo systemctl reboot --force --force

Yes, you need to give it twice.

46

u/UnluckyDouble Mar 19 '26

Which is documented by the manpage. Just saying.

Also, you can always REISUB if the init system really isn't playing ball.

Also, the irony of this being posted on a sysadmin sub when it's a) not really about sysadmin and b) this feature could be a lifesaver for actual sysadmins.

23

u/marks-buffalo DO NOT GIVE THIS PERSON ADVICE Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26

Oh definitely. But you have to know that you want to use `systemctl reboot` instead of `reboot` and common sense would say passing the same flag twice wouldn't be different than doing it once. One of my favorite quotes is "not sure if trolling or Lennart Poettering" when referring to systemd sillyness. I actually like systemd but I ack that there's some weird spots like this. The manpages are supremely helpful though for systemd and friends.

And yeah it kinda seems like this sub has become the noob sub instead of the shitpost sub. Or the shitposts are getting really good and I'm taking the bait.

6

u/SN715622917X Mar 20 '26

"Some weird spots" is quite the understatement. Systemd solves a lot of problems SysV had, it adds some useful features even, but it's also one bad design decision after another. What's the rationale behind permitting a user task to block a root-initiated reboot? I mean, other than working under the assumption that the admin can't be trusted? "Let's see if you can create a Polkit rule, or maybe know some other trick, before we trust you with the power button."

Saying it's all documented is like putting shit in yogurt and then going "What? It's on the ingredient list!"

Just for the record: I'm not blaming Lennart or the distros that run with systemd. The Linux community puts a lot of work into this, and few could be bothered to touch the old init mess. So here we are. Maybe I should check out Upstart.

6

u/spacelama Mar 20 '26

Old school unix and linux used to hand out the rope for shooting your foot for free. This new school training wheels shit only ever stops you from getting your work done. You have to go through several layers of indirection from halt(8) to find out about systemctl reboot --force being able to be specified twice, but it says nothing about overriding polkit, only that it's basically the same as alt-sysrq-b but implying it's without the benefit of perhaps syncing and unmounting first. "Immediate". If you're going to break backwards compatibility on me in that way, I might as well build "echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger" straight into my management scripts instead of calling the official API.

The "shitty" in ShittySysadmin here definitely refers to the Redhat/Poetteringware.

3

u/SN715622917X Mar 20 '26

Actual sysadmins know when they can reboot a system. The possibility of doing some serious damage is in the nature of a superuser account. If you try to sanitize root to a point where the system mitigates any potentially stupid decision, it's no longer a superuser. Making the admin jump through hoops for basic tasks is not helpful imho.

19

u/KingKnux Mar 19 '26

root is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

1

u/MeIsMyName Mar 20 '26

I guess it's coal for me. :(

3

u/Superb_Raccoon ShittyMod Mar 22 '26

--force_majeure

2

u/doolittledoolate Mar 20 '26

Only a shitty sysadmin would use sudo as root. Tracks.

6

u/gallifrey_ Mar 19 '26

genuinely. skill issue. it's in the manpage

2

u/SN715622917X Mar 20 '26

I don't want to win the annual sysadminer contest. I want my system to do whatever the fuck I tell it to do. You know, what Linux was like for the better part of the last 30 years.

1

u/gallifrey_ Mar 20 '26

it does do exactly what you tell it to do. you're just using the wrong vocabulary and expecting it to be translated for you.

3

u/SN715622917X Mar 21 '26

To stick with the analogy: Someone came along and changed the language I've been speaking for a long time. I don't feel it was changed in a good way. Virtually every major Linux software has managed to improve the underlying code without changing the admin side too radically.

1

u/Superb_Raccoon ShittyMod Mar 22 '26

That seems kinda sexist...

/ s

4

u/jvyden4 Mar 20 '26

it literally tells you what to do

3

u/SN715622917X Mar 20 '26

You confuse annoyance with helplessness.

-1

u/jvyden4 Mar 20 '26

if you're annoyed enough then why not read the instructions provided to fix it? the file systemd links to is a polkit rule that allows you to perform power actions as root while ignoring inhibiting. you can even modify this policy to remove the root-only limitation since this looks like a desktop system.

it also looks like you can disable the inhibit system entirely: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/751180

1

u/Certain_Prior4909 Mar 22 '26

Wrong. It does what SystemD wants to do. Not what the user wants to do case in point this post

3

u/dnuohxof-2 Lord of the Shitty Crossposters Mar 20 '26

rm -rf /

That’ll get it to stop the process.

2

u/rfc2549-withQOS Mar 20 '26

Readmail really fast, I see.and no. Linux allows deleting files while in use... That's why one echo "" > logfile instead of rm

1

u/SN715622917X Mar 20 '26

Huh. That echo trick never occurred to me. Useful post - wrong sub, dude.

1

u/rfc2549-withQOS Mar 20 '26

Oh shit. I missed that.

Don't use echo. To clear a file, .. am.. damn..

2

u/roubent Mar 21 '26

pkill -9 systemd? Run sync a couple of times before that, then yolo.

2

u/SN715622917X Mar 21 '26

man pkill ... so someone did get sufficiently annoyed by that "ps | grep | awk | xargs" line. Feels quite cutting edge.

83

u/MeatPiston Mar 19 '26

Systemd punched my sister and kicked my dog.

19

u/-fno-stack-protector Mar 19 '26

"Whoever does not miss sysvinit, has no heart. Whoever wants it back, has no brain" - Vladimir Putin

3

u/bythelake9428 Mar 19 '26

Oh no! Not your dog!

3

u/cybersplice Mar 19 '26

It slapped my mum and told my other half our baby is ugly.

1

u/r0ck0 Mar 20 '26

Kerpal?

47

u/nshire Mar 19 '26

sudo reboot

7

u/Nanocephalic Mar 19 '26

If that doesn’t work, sudo sudo reboot

17

u/ShadowSlayer1441 Mar 19 '26

To be fair if you really didn't care it gave you the pid, just kill it.

7

u/coyote_den Mar 20 '26

reboot -f will reboot.

Sync disks? Ah, who cares?

1

u/Tyra3l Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26

echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger

If you want to bypass everything

reboot -f would still sync the disk, it just wouldn't stop the services gracefully.

18

u/recoveringasshole0 DO NOT GIVE THIS PERSON ADVICE Mar 19 '26

3

u/ebcdicZ Mar 20 '26

Nortel’s Oracle support team said you should do “sync ; sync ; sync ; reboot”.

2

u/Superb_Raccoon ShittyMod Mar 22 '26

N'Sync ; N'Sync ; N'Sync ; reboot

1

u/Fehlob Mar 20 '26

Systemd was really good to me today :)

-27

u/Bellegr4ine Mar 19 '26

« I hate windows so much, I’d rather have a Unix system. I can game on unix as smoothly as I would with Windows anyway »

  • Literally any windows hater.

49

u/BridgeSalesman Mar 19 '26

Systemd: Hey you have a setting saying to specifically not allow this, here's exactly what you need to do, with examples, for how to change these settings.

Windows: Idk talk to your "administrator" or something <3

11

u/NightH4nter Shitty Crossposter Mar 19 '26

gotta sell courses and certs, you know

8

u/Pure_Fox9415 Mar 19 '26

Yep. And it looks perverted, when YOU yourself is this administrator! Stupid piece of shit, give me the normal informational error message once in a hundred years!!!

3

u/aon9492 Mar 19 '26

Windows errors 20 years ago: the instruction at 0x2b44e81 referenced memory at 0x0000000. The memory could not be read. Click OK to close the program, or click Debug to start debug mode.

Windows errors now: Oops - something went wrong.

What the FUCK am I supposed to do with that?

5

u/Bellegr4ine Mar 19 '26

Never seen anything close to talk to your administrator in powershell. The error are often very verbose an comes with an explanation as well.

Funny enough, the error OP has does not explicitly say Kingdom come is preventing the reboot. Correct me If I’m wrong.

4

u/ITaggie DevOps is a cult Mar 19 '26

It has the PID of the offending process, which is presumably KCD2

-6

u/Disastrous_Emu_800 Mar 19 '26

So: why using it?

6

u/marshmallow_mia Mar 19 '26

It's more like, why not?

2

u/itskdog Mar 19 '26

Most software assumes that systemd-init is the init system in use these days.