Re: How Unix manages processes in userland

["Aaron B." <aaron%zadzmo.org@localhost>]

On Fri, 6 Dec 2013 08:42:19 +0000
David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:

> I think if we want to improve the state of the art in this regard the
> way to do it is to look at what a "service" is (in the sense of things
> like "service nfsd start", not /etc/services) and try to come up with
> some abstractions that make sense and aren't oversimplified or
> crippled.

Agreed!

As a sysadmin, I often care less about the internal details, and more about 
what a system provides. What I want to see:

1) Easy to define/install a new service
2) Easy to manipulate a service (enable/disable/restart/etc)
3) Easy to query a service's state.

IMHO, #3 is the ticky part. People often assume things are 'up' or 'down' and 
ignore the scope of all the other failures in between. 

I think the question of what a service is, is in fact simple: anything in 
userland you can configure on or off, and anything userland that might break. 
Daemons, firewall state, inetd-driven processes, possibly even network 
interfaces and filesystems are fair game.

-- 
Aaron B. <aaron%zadzmo.org@localhost>