A nice story about Unix processes “infecting” each other
Ah yes, the good old days some people are mysteriously nostalgic about.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.Having an elaborate dance around system upgrades because it can break ssh was a perfectly normal thing. You're just supposed to know that.And init scripts are fine as they are, you're just supposed to know processes inherit stuff, and take that into account.And stray pid files sometimes stop a service from starting, that's also basic knowledge.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.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.I for one am very glad that systemd modernized things a bit and helped remove some of this stuff from the equation.