Hi Ken Teh! On 2014.08.25 at 12:58:21 -0500, Ken Teh wrote next: > I read the following article on systemd > > http://ifwnewsletters.newsletters.infoworld.com/t/9625863/474699771/826094/14/ > > The comments suggested one could still revert to sysvinit. Is this just wishful thinking on my part? Yes. As an exercise, why don't you revert EL6's upstart to sysvinit? Note that enabling/disabling some services on EL6 *requires* you to use upstart-specific initctl, you simply won't notice these services if you will only look at chkconfig. systemd offers many benefits for system administrators, like: - simple and predictable service files - ability to wrap a random application into service with just a few lines of config - no more extra-complicated init scripts using various hacks and magic for non-C applications (if you ever tried to wrap some random python or java application into service, you'll know what I'm talking about right away) - automatic restart of services - thanks to these features (service created with few lines of code, automatic restart, some others) - no more need for runit, daemontools or supervisord , you can have all the benefits of these systems while having only one flat init system (systemd) for both system and your services - reliable pid tracking, which even follows the forks - that's something not current init system or others like runit are able to do. No more hassle with complex pgrep's for applications that didn't leave pidfile behind (again, applications that rename or fork themselves and non-C applications can be extremely annoying here). But systemd has reliable way of knowing all the pids that each service has created without any hacks at all - thanks to cgroups support. - ... many more, like various niceties for supporting lightweight containers with blazing fast startup, where systemd cares about organizing namespaces and initializing network by itself (not sure these features are in EL7's systemd, though) really, for everyone who spent many hours wrapping developers' applications into services or had to bother with various hacks and scripts "to let this stupid application daemonize more easily" like forever, runit, supervisord or misses various features of solaris smf in linux, systemd is a real bliss. -- Vladimir