A nice story about Unix processes “infecting” each other
Ah yes, the good old days some people are mysteriously nostalgic about.<p>I've seen quite a few people insist that SysV was perfectly fine and nothing about it needed fixing. But this article is a good example of how that kind of thing actually went: a myriad gotchas, bugs and undesirable characteristics eventually became so entrenched and familiar that knowing about all of this just became part of the sysadmin job.<p>Having an elaborate dance around system upgrades because it can break ssh was a perfectly normal thing. You're just supposed to know that.<p>And init scripts are fine as they are, you're just supposed to know processes inherit stuff, and take that into account.<p>And stray pid files sometimes stop a service from starting, that's also basic knowledge.<p>And rebooting? Nah, we'll keep the machine running for 2 years without a kernel upgrade, because who knows if all the services will come back after a reboot. Better not risk it.<p>And I kinda think I know why some people actually liked that. Figuring out problems like this when nobody else can and saving the day makes you feel like a wizard. The problem is that the competition didn't sit still and eventually Windows and Mac got good enough, and all this stuff became even more of a clunky impediment to getting stuff done.<p>I for one am very glad that systemd modernized things a bit and helped remove some of this stuff from the equation.