[TriLUG] Locked Out Linux box (Denouement)

[Steve Litt via TriLUG]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2017 09:46:16 -0400
Paul Boyle via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 23 Oct 2017 19:43:40 +0000 (UTC)
> John Vaughters via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > Depending on your needs, you may find Ubuntu better if you are doing
> > end user tasks and you are reading about all those great features
> > only to find out you cannot do it on Centos. Or find a great library
> > for exactly what you need to solve your issue and Centos does not
> > have the proper library versions you need. I have tried many
> > distributions, but never SUSE. So I too wish you luck with Centos
> > and that it does not get in the way of your tasks, but if it does
> > consider an Ubuntu load.  
> 
> As I mentioned in my reply to Steve Litt's post, moving to Ubuntu (or
> a variant thereof), depends on whether or not I'll be able to convert
> the proprietary rpms I use for my work to debs.
> 
> Paul 

Any chance of accessing your software as a source tree (via tarball)?
If so, perhaps you'd have a wider range of distros on which to install
it, if, for instance, systemd gets to be too much of a pita.

While I'm on the subject of systemd, consider that having systemd
doesn't force you to run all your daemons from systemd. You could start
a supervisor like runit, s6 or daemontools-encore from systemd, and
then start some or most of your daemons from your supervisor. The
supervisors grant you spectacular troubleshooting and control ability
for your daemons.

I've done this for years. I was never a fan of sysvinit or Upstart
(though I view those as paradise compared to systemd), so I used
sysvinit or Upstart to run daemontools, and ran a lot of my daemons via
daemontools. People criticized me for having to learn a whole second
system, but from my point of view, the first time sysvinit started
giving me its typical bullshit (remember those init scripts?), I just
made a daemontools service to run it and neutered its sysvinit service.
Worked great for me!

Daemontools-encore, runit and s6 are all great software. I recommend
you use runit for your supervisor because:

1) Runit is simpler and easier to understand than s6

2) Unlike daemontools-encore, runit comes with a PID1 so it can be your
   whole init system if you later decide to follow that path.

HTH,

SteveT

Steve Litt 
October 2017 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21