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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: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @07:04PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @07:04PM (#989113)

    How nice for you. My experience with SystemD has been very different. Ever since the switch to it, I run in to all sorts of problems that never happened before, and yes, they're all SystemD's fault. Networking issues are a surprisingly large amount of them, including systems not shutting down because they get in odd SystemD loops that never finish. More recently, I had a box that suddenly decided it was going to go into suspend mode after being up for about 5 minutes, and kept doing it. Logs show that SystemD is triggering this, but not why it's doing so. Such fun to troubleshoot this shit remotely.

    Lots of the push-back to SystemD is because they want to rework everything else the way they want it to happen, instead of how it's been done in the past. They've very much ignored the unix philosophy, and it keeps getting worse. I've already switched to Devuan wherever possible, but since we have to support clients that use RHEL and Ubuntu and the like, I can't get away from the festering bowl of dog snot that is SystemD.

    Oh, and the problem isn't learning new things. The problem is that the new things aren't working. And letting all this be designed by Pottering, who could system architect his way out of a wet paper bag, just makes it look like a bid for service revenue.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @08:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @08:12PM (#989167)

    The problem with systemd is similar to the problem with pulseaudio and other replacements to older systems. They make it easier to do the common situations, or at least the developer's vision of "common." But the tradeoff is that once you get out of those situations, things become harder. If your experience doesn't match up with what the developer believes sees as common, good luck to you.