On 1/25/21 2:01 PM, Andrew C Aitchison wrote:
> I'm somewhat old school (I am still using twm as my window manager* over
> a decade later) so I don't know why anyone would want this new-fangled DBus
> thing that, as you say, lets a chat program addon cause a music player
> to crash the kernel.
Eh. Have to remember the time frame. From the late 90's to late 00's
chat applications were almost an essential way of life for most of us
computer nerds. Pidgin let me tie into IRC, ICQ, AIM, ect ect ect. Sure,
having silly things like my status being updated with what music I was
playing was all for that nerd-life-cred. But there was a lot of things
that I depended on in those days. Nearly all of my system monitoring and
alerting reached out to me via those chat applications. Whether it was a
long running compile-then-run script chomping one of my cores on the
local system or my webserver at work, that's how I was notified.
Today, all those integrations for monitoring are a combination of Zabbix
+ Mattermost. But back then, dbus was a fantastic new way of getting
active status from applications. Dbus is so much more and most users
don't even know it's running.
> For release after release we had to hack/patch an init script.
> IIRC this was Red Hat 4 and 5, and I don't remember all the details, so
> what follows may be a little off: We had to make ypbind run on
> a fixed port so that nfsd didn't fail because something else had grabbed
> the port first (or was it the other way around ?)
>
> With that experience I wont believe you if you tell me that a complex
> C program handling lots of signals and processes is safer than a shell
> script. I know which one I can hack sucessfully and have enough smarts
> to consider whether what I did was secure.
>
>> From what yo say, systemd might have been the right answer to my
> original problem, but if Red Hat couldn't get around to fixing the
> nfsd/ypbind conflict, could I expect them to make code 10 times
> (or maybe a 100) more complex any more reliable ?
Systemd would help with a lot of that pain and I don't think it would
make it more complex. Yellowpages had a ton of issues. I'm personally
glad I've not had to touch that in years! :-D
> By the sound of it Larry Linder, who started this discussion, finds
> that chat programs and music players don't help the productivity
> of his machine-tool shop either. If D-Bus is a problem why would
> he want a complex system that appears to exist to allow it ?
I don't run chat programs nor music players on my production cluster
nodes either. Those were just examples of use. But dbus is still there
on the cluster nodes. Why? Because the company standardized on AD for
authentication talks to services over dbus. We have bluetooth sensors
that pull data. Bluetooth talks to hardware and software services with
dbus. When I have a drive die and I pull it out to slide a new one in so
that the RAID can rebuild itself, that communication is dbus! The
security team makes me run full SELinux with extra rules which involves
polkit which is...drum-roll...dbus!
:-D
Dbus means "Desktop bus" but these days it's much more then desktop.
Why? Because all dbus does is act as a platform for communication.
Without dbus, my application would have to talk directly to _every_
other application. That's messy and nasty. It certainly doesn't scale.
Dbus is just one thing that my application has to talk to.
Can one use dbus without systemd? Absolutely. Most of the distro's that
don't use systemd still have dbus. It's more of a different level then
systemd. Systemd just provides a whole lot of niceties to make it easier
to communicate and manage the services that talk to each other.
> * No, I do not want a "desktop environment". My windows were either
> firefox or xterm's sshd into other machines - sometimes a hundred,
> fired up in batches of twenty.
I get it. I personally miss EvilWM. https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.6809.org.uk_evilwm_&d=DwIDaQ&c=gRgGjJ3BkIsb5y6s49QqsA&r=gd8BzeSQcySVxr0gDWSEbN-P-pgDXkdyCtaMqdCgPPdW1cyL5RIpaIYrCn8C5x2A&m=YrwMA54vsOmAKha6cxK4r26yqFpWhMRgKm7xk5p_Y2o&s=toG-ahqqKwQQ9VWD94amXog6la2u6RS7o-r-HOwiLvM&e=
It was all keyboard controlled. No mouse. I loved it. But it hasn't been
maintained in a long time and problems weren't being fixed. :-(
I settled on LXDE because it was simple but provided a few more
niceties. I've reluctantly switched to LXQT and I don't like it nearly
as much as LXDE, but LXQT is the supported path forward. I loath most
all of the other desktop GUI's. My laptop and primary desktop are the
only ones with a GUI. Everything else is minimal head-less servers.
xterm bothers me. It's fine for a shell, but I want more flexibility out
of my terminal since I practically live on the terminal. Personally a
huge fan of terminator.
I don't want to count the number of shell currently open nor the number
of systems I'm connected to...it might scare me... I use multiple
desktops to help separate the mess into reasonable bins...and there's
too many of those... :-D
For people like us, the desktop is more of a way to have more shell
windows open! :-D
~Stack~
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