[clug] September Canberra Linux Users Group meeting

[Paul Wayper]

	Canberra Linux Users Group Meeting - 23rd September 2010
	========================================================

Date:		23rd September 2010 (Fourth Thursday of the month)

Time:		19:00 - 21:00 (or when it finishes)

Speaker:	Paul Wayper

Abstract:	Paul will be talking about systemd, the new init process
		written by Lennart Poettering. 
		
		The old System V init process has been with us for more
		than a few decades, and while well understood it is not
		an efficient or robust system. It does not handle
		dependencies very well, does not handle services
		crashing or hanging well, starts many short-lived child
		processes (which is wasteful) and does not integrate
		well with suspend, hibernate and other service start-ups
		and shut-downs. 
		
		Some years ago, the 'upstart' project was started to
		try and solve these problems, and it has achieved some
		success - it has been included in several distributions
		including Ubuntu and Fedora. However, the ongoing
		complexity of designing the domain-specific language to
		cope with the configuration dependencies and signalling
		issues, and the occasional complete redesigns and
		problems have not helped its uptake. 
		
		Systemd promises to be a new way to start and run
		services in two ways. Firstly, it tries to defer
		starting services until they're actually needed, and
		then does as many in parallel as it can. This applies
		not just to programs like cups and sshd but also D-Bus,
		Avahi and even file systems. Secondly, it provides a
		much better way to maintain and run services; rather
		than inittab restarting a service every time, or having
		cron jobs that periodically check and restart services,
		all service start-up is managed by systemd. 
		
		Best of all, it does all this in very standard Unix-y
		ways - using sockets, automounts and other existing
		mechanisms rather than complicated configuration
		languages. No more mucking about with bash scripts or
		starting fifteen awk, sed, cut and grep processes in
		order to start your ntpd - with systemd it's all done
		quickly and easily. 
		
		What's not to like? Come to the meeting and find out! 

Venue:		Room N101
		Computer Science and Information Technology Building
		North Road
		The Australian National University

		See http://clug.org.au/ for more directions and a map

Food/drink:	Pizza and soft drink/juice. Come hungry, and bring 
		about $6 to cover the cost of your share if you 
		want some.

If you would like to give a talk at a future meeting, please email me.