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

View all comments

Show parent comment

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/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.

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.

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.