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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday October 05 2016, @12:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the love-for-lennart dept.

Security researcher and MateSSL founder, Andrew Ayer has uncovered a bug which will either crash or make systemd unstable (depending on who you talk to) on pretty much every linux distro. David Strauss posted a highly critical response to Ayer. In true pedantic nerd-fight fashion there is a bit of back and forth between them over the "true" severity of the issue and what not.

Nerd fights aside, how you feel about this bug, will probably largely depend on how you feel about systemd in general.

The following command, when run as any user, will crash systemd:

NOTIFY_SOCKET=/run/systemd/notify systemd-notify ""

After running this command, PID 1 is hung in the pause system call. You can no longer start and stop daemons. inetd-style services no longer accept connections. You cannot cleanly reboot the system. The system feels generally unstable (e.g. ssh and su hang for 30 seconds since systemd is now integrated with the login system). All of this can be caused by a command that's short enough to fit in a Tweet.

Edit (2016-09-28 21:34): Some people can only reproduce if they wrap the command in a while true loop. Yay non-determinism!


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 05 2016, @12:42PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 05 2016, @12:42PM (#410559)

    Let me fix your typo

    I've come to the conclusion that FreeBSD is the right OS for any machine

    Great minds must think alike...

    Back when I was using "not quite unix" I was like, eh I got LVM and MD, what do I need ZFS for, but now I love ZFS...

    I've come to enjoy /usr/ports although its an acquired taste. Its generally more up to date than linux solutions and actually works. You really can install something obese and ridiculous like Jenkins from ports and it just works. Ditto slurm and its friends munge etc. Stuff just works.

    PF is like tea vs coffee, if you go in thinking its just swap one keyword for another you'll have a rough time, but once you're comfortable with the differing architecture its pretty smooth.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday October 05 2016, @05:32PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday October 05 2016, @05:32PM (#410729) Homepage

    No, FreeBSD is not the right OS for my personal machine. I like being able to modify my kernel/core userland freely, and the BSD model obstructs that. Personal OS preferences are, well, personal, but for servers there are a few objective rights and wrongs.

    Nothing wrong with BSD, I just like breaking things on my own time.

    --
    Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 05 2016, @05:55PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 05 2016, @05:55PM (#410743)

      and the BSD model obstructs that

      How does that even work?

      Obviously not a legal thing since you're all "my machine". You can always do anything you want on your machine. Redistribution, well thats where things get interesting with both BSD and GPL and several other licenses.

      I'm guessing you're implying that if you make massive changes to the base/core then "freebsd-update" can be a bit brutal about setting things back the way they should be. Of course if you change things enough (like massive changes to file system hierarchy) then its not really freebsd anymore such that you can't expect to use freebsd's update in the future. But it doesn't really stop you from changing, just stop you from applying fresh freebsd on top of no longer freebsd. Like if as an experiment you implemented apple OSX file system hierarchy on freebsd, that might get a bit weird and freebsd-update would likely get wound up about it.

      Oh maybe if you disagree fundamentally with the way something is done in /usr/ports and unlike the million dials currently in /usr/ports it can't just be tweaked as an option, it can't be fixed inside /usr/ports. I can't imagine what because /usr/ports is like gentoo on speed or something. But assuming "it" exists although I can't imagine what... You could compile as a package and use pkgng. You can add your personal repo for other machines to /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf just like messing with /etc/apt/sources.list on linux. Or I suppose just not use pkgng or ports and install software by hand like we used to in the early 90s. I don't really miss those days but it'll work. I know I should be deploying locally made software as packages like I used to on linux, but build automation and ansible and puppet type systems make it easy to manually automatically deploy...