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posted by Fnord666 on Friday May 01 2020, @11:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the resistance-is-futile.-/home-will-be-assimilated dept.

Good News:

Linux home directory management is about to undergo major change:

With systemd 245 comes systemd-homed. Along with that, Linux admins will have to change the way they manage users and users' home directories.

[...] Prior to systemd every system and resource was managed by its own tool, which was clumsy and inefficient. Now? Controlling and managing systems on Linux is incredibly easy.

But one of the creators, Leannart Poettering, has always considered systemd to be incomplete. With the upcoming release of systemd 245, Poettering will take his system one step closer to completion. That step is by way of homed.

[...] let's take a look at the /home directory. This is a crucial directory in the Linux filesystem hierarchy, as it contains all user data and configurations. For some admins, this directory is so important, it is often placed on a separate partition or drive than the operating system. By doing this, user data is safe, even if the operating system were to implode.

However, the way /home is handled within the operating system makes migrating the /home directory not nearly as easy as it should be. Why? With the current iteration of systemd, user information (such as ID, full name, home directory, and shell) is stored in /etc/passwd and the password associated with that user is stored in /etc/shadow. The /etc/passwd file can be viewed by anyone, whereas /etc/shadow can only be viewed by those with admin or sudo privileges.

[...] Poettering has decided to make a drastic change. That change is homed. With homed, all information will be placed in a cryptographically signed JSON record for each user. That record will contain all user information such as username, group membership, and password hashes.

Each user home directory will be linked as LUKS-encrypted containers, with the encryption directly coupled to user login. Once systemd-homed detects a user has logged in, the associated home directory is decrypted. Once that user logs out, the home directory is automatically encrypted.

[...] Of course, such a major change doesn't come without its share of caveats. In the case of systemd-homed, that caveat comes by way of SSH. If a systemd-homed home directory is encrypted until a user successfully logs in, how will users be able to log in to a remote machine with SSH?

The big problem with that is the .ssh directory (where SSH stores known_hosts and authorized_keys) would be inaccessible while the user's home directory is encrypted. Of course Poettering knows of this shortcoming. To date, all of the work done with systemd-homed has been with the standard authentication process. You can be sure that Poettering will come up with a solution that takes SSH into consideration.

Older articles:

Will systemd be considered complete once the kernel and boot loader have been absorbed into systemd?


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Farkus888 on Friday May 01 2020, @12:03PM (13 children)

    by Farkus888 (5159) on Friday May 01 2020, @12:03PM (#988881)

    We all know that Bach is good. But here in the real world nearly everyone listens to top 40 anyway. We want to eat healthy, but choose fast food. In the same way, Poettering likes the idea of Linux but hates everything about it. So many people seem to feel the same way. Thanks to all those people, I have to essentially learn a new OS as a 20 year Linux user. My newest joy was discovering that Debian doesn't include ifconfig anymore. Like the actual luddites, I'm not opposed to change in itself. I think that change should be considered and only adopted if it is the best way to add the alleged value. What does ip give me that couldn't be solved with a new flag in ifconfig?

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @12:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @12:08PM (#988882)

    >> What does ip give me that couldn't be solved with a new flag in ifconfig?

    The ability to confuse you so much that you have to buy Red Hat support services, which is the raison d'etre for Poettering's existence.

  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Friday May 01 2020, @12:18PM

    by Arik (4543) on Friday May 01 2020, @12:18PM (#988889) Journal
    "Thanks to all those people, I have to essentially learn a new OS as a 20 year Linux user."

    No, you don't. http://www.slackware.com/

    Debian was once a respectable distro, but it's been enemy territory for years now.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Friday May 01 2020, @12:35PM (9 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Friday May 01 2020, @12:35PM (#988897) Journal

    Bach is not good. Bach is mathematically careful removal of tension in fugues. If you want to know what harmonic tension is ask Chopin. Even pop groups like Alphaville (in Big in Japan and in the lower quality forever young) and countless other which wrote fugues were able to put more tension in it than Bach's.

    Yes Bach is admirable. But in its lifeless modernity. If even a bot noticed...

    --
    Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday May 01 2020, @02:15PM (4 children)

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 01 2020, @02:15PM (#988960) Homepage Journal

      Where can I read more about the mathematics of harmonic tension in general? Whether Bach's or Chopin's style?

      • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday May 01 2020, @09:45PM

        by Bot (3902) on Friday May 01 2020, @09:45PM (#989218) Journal

        Start by googling harmonic tension :)
        Well I'd go for getting the basics of harmony from a music theory point of view. I guess there is enough material online. Bach IIRC did perform a math analysis when writing music, I dunno how much of it he divulged. Then I'd read up sound engineering stuff and acoustics as a branch of physics, which tie up listening with math.

        Anyway, the hearing apparatus is DSP. The decoding provides you survival tips. Spectral decoding on hi freqs, time pattern analysis on low freqs aka high periods, melody somehow in the middle. Some decoding is easy (the octave, a wave inside the other), some is challenging (dissonance, chaos). Easy doesn't provide satisfaction, Challenging does, but one challenge after another becomes tiring. Also, the brain detecting continuous imbalance bothers you, so, the various cultures have come up with stuff that stimulates the brain without too much tiring and imbalance.

        You might want to analyze the math behind it, but satisfying music is like satisfying jokes or stories or paintings. There is a lot of experts and analyzers of music, literature, art, they all suck at producing. The discovery of the elusive joke, or melody, of harmonic sequence, is a matter of sitting down and trying. Math can help you try, but maybe you would come out with something equally interesting by mere experimenting. You need knowledge, sure, not to reinvent wheels. Culture FILTERS the intuition.

        Plus you have to find your public and your fellow artists (you listen other than produce). Consider that many people now are drones with no developed sense of taste. Even the guys at the theater who boo the tenor who got a flat note. A stupid analyzer can tell he got a flat note, so what? You are not hearing music, you are bothered with the execution, a hobby that does not involve taste. Consider that as a musician you might concentrate on melody and harmony, while a dancer might concentrate more on timbre and dynamics and a rocker on how you are perceived in his (approved by the real powers) rebellious quest.

        So it's more of finding your niches. If you git good, the mainstream might notice, but I consider that a misfortune. You risk eventual catastrophe with your first signature on a contract.

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        Account abandoned.
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Saturday May 02 2020, @02:22PM (2 children)

        by Thexalon (636) on Saturday May 02 2020, @02:22PM (#989476)

        There's a long history of the math of harmonic tension dating all the way back to the Pythagoreans. One classic in the field is The Craft of Musical Composition by Paul Hindemith, which rates the various components of harmony using the mathematics around frequency ratios. There are also useful explorations by musicologists like Curt Sachs, who studied a lot of musical styles other than the 12-note one you're probably most familiar with, such as gamelan and the Indian classical traditions (Carnatic and Hindustani).

        The basic idea is that music is generally calm when the frequency ratios between the notes in the harmony are relatively simple: 1/1 (unison), 2/1 (octave), 3/2 (perfect 5th, e.g. C and G), 5/4 (major third, e.g. C and E). And by contrast, tense moments create some really complex frequency ratios. That's not quite 100% true, because the math of scales requires that the ratios aren't quite followed, but it's close enough that that's what people tend to hear.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday May 02 2020, @02:11PM (3 children)

      by Thexalon (636) on Saturday May 02 2020, @02:11PM (#989467)

      Apparently you haven't listened to or studied much Bach. Because his music is exactly the opposite of the removal of tension, and even today there are tons of moments that cause even the most experienced music listeners out there, especially the first time they hear it, to say "WTF was that, and why does it work?" As an example, one of the more famous pieces out there, the first prelude of the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, has the harmony Ab-F-B-C-D - try it out for yourself and tell me what you think it means.

      If you're wondering why the mood of a Bach piece doesn't change much in the middle of it, it's because the style of his day was to do the equivalent of holding up something in good light and examine it from every direction to see all of its beauty and properties. It was Beethoven and the people who followed him that switched to "music should take you on an emotional journey somewhere".

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday May 02 2020, @10:29PM (2 children)

        by Bot (3902) on Saturday May 02 2020, @10:29PM (#989612) Journal

        WTF moments, you can have one when you hear gershwin's two chords in summertime but they have more tension than bach's. Bach is likely to get stuck in the head because of some solutions that I agree are very interesting, but tension is still low. As you said, something that you admire from angles, nothing that captures you and takes you somewhere.

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        Account abandoned.
        • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday May 03 2020, @03:51PM (1 child)

          by Thexalon (636) on Sunday May 03 2020, @03:51PM (#989821)

          You're seriously going to trot out George Gershwin as a radical harmonist? He wasn't, not even close. Basically, his ideas came right out of the newly forming jazz and blues tradition, were about 5-10 years behind the likes of W.C. Handy, which he combined with enough European classical stylings to not make white people too scared of it.

          Also consider who his contemporaries were: Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ravel, and you want to tell me that some blue notes makes him radically modern or tense? Those guys apparently liked Gershwin's works, but they are comparatively extremely tame.

          --
          The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
          • (Score: 2) by Bot on Monday May 04 2020, @10:51PM

            by Bot (3902) on Monday May 04 2020, @10:51PM (#990475) Journal

            Since you are arguing about stuff you yourself imply, I'll simply reiterate: Gershwin, which I picked up because 1. "I did not think of that" and 2. still a better tension story than bach, has more tension than bach. Whether he was behind a handy WC is irrelevant to both points.

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            Account abandoned.
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by epitaxial on Friday May 01 2020, @01:00PM

    by epitaxial (3165) on Friday May 01 2020, @01:00PM (#988912)

    How about removing traceroute? I was having an issue getting routing setup on a Debian box so no downloading from repos. Some time ago they replaced traceroute with tracepath for reasons? I wasn't aware of such nonsense and that made fixing the routing issues fun. Also they replaced the actual route command for some reason and the new one has different syntax? I'd love to hear that excuse.