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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

Linux and SystemD work and work good. Because the people who use it like it and we don't have many complaints besides logs are no longer text files we have to use journalctl. The strong critics usually go the route of "It remains to be seen if this is a good or bad thing."

Systemd has been a replacement for the worst part of Linux, init. It was confusing and was just barely workable. It has been needing replacement for 5 or more years. There were SEVERAL solutions brought out and well more developers like SystemD more then the rest.

As a user in Arch Linux, OpenSUSE and Fedora it has been rock solid and I have been able to do things at my knowledge level much more consistent and lower level.

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you dont have to use journald. you can send back from journald to syslog (eg rsyslog) and that works well/its easy to do. You can even disable the journald logging itself and just have rsyslog (or the logger of your choice).

at my place we kept both journald and have rsyslog to redirect logs to the network. ie our /var/log is relatively empty (rsyslog isnt setup to log to disk) so we look at log on the machine via journald if needed (rarely - since we look at the central log aggregator instead)

> you dont have to use journald. you can send back from journald to syslog

That's a contradiction. You're running journald even if it's dead weight.

And if journald goes belly up, no logs for syslog...

As if syslog cannot go belly up as well.

When have you ever seen syslog go belly up?

You are clearly too young to remember. But don't worry journal will get there

That's the entire point. Syslog has years of stability and reliability. You don't just throw that away, especially for such an important role.

Can you assure it is 100% failure proof in all UNIX variants that have one running?

Lets assume for the sake of argument that logind (a new codebase) is about as stable as syslog (anyone of which are several years old, well tested). Layering one on top of the other, you now have doubled the chance of one of them going belly up.

And if syslog goes belly up no logs. What's your point?

So now instead of syslog we have journald AND syslog - we only doubled the risk of something going boom and taking away our ability to log. I don't think that's nice.

You used have one component that needed to fail to start losing logs. Now you have two.

Technically its really just a socket dup

Using sane/standard logging should be the first thing an installer asks before installing systemd based OS. In fact, just make separate .isos for this.

(and I like systemd, at least in theory - and running Fedora 20).

opensuse and debian both continue to log to their respective syslog implementations.

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