Fedora 32 Planning To Make Use Of systemd's sysusers.d For Declaring New Users

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 32 Planning To Make Use Of systemd's sysusers.d For Declaring New Users

Fedora 32 is likely to make use of systemd's sysusers.d functionality for packages declaring new system users as part of the package installation process. This change proposal is being led by Red Hat's Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek of their systemd team...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-32-sysusers.d-Plan

[Neraxa]

This is going to be a big improvement and should help make system administration easier and more reliable and much easier to manage. I hope we see many big improvement and additional capabilities and expansions of the systemd ecosystem into new areas to come in the next year that will make systemd even more of a powerful, rich and extensive suite of tools.

[NotMine999]

Fails to see what problem is being solved by this feature.

[tildearrow]

I have a question. Is systemd able to handle a large number of users? (thousands)

[starshipeleven]

I notice that Gentoo has been trying to make the addition of system users and groups more declarative, by adding them via the portage system as individual packages. eg. acct-user/postfix. I am currently sitting on an openrc system, but I wonder if it boils down to sysusers.d entries on systemd systems.

yes. https://www.freedesktop.org/software...ysusers.d.html

EDIT: no wait, if you mean on Gentoo systems running with systemd it seems they are still using portage, there is no provision for using systemd or not, besides, it would not make much sense to do so if you have your own system that in practice does the same job. https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gento...stfix-0.ebuild

[starshipeleven]

Fails to see what problem is being solved by this feature.

administration and distro maintenance is easier as this system allows to see faster what package created what user and when, and it's apparently to be in line with what OpenSUSE does so I always approve that.

[starshipeleven]

I have a question. Is systemd able to handle a large number of users? (thousands)

systemd-sysusers isn't "handling" users.

This application is a tool that adds or removes users or groups from /etc/passwd and /etc/group automatically, reducing the need to do that with custom scripting in pre- post- and whatever script run by the package.

It provides a /etc/password.d and /etc/group.d -like functionality, which is commonplace for most other stuff (just look in your /etc folder to see other folders ending with .d) so the package installation script does not need to parse and edit system files and just drops his own config file in a folder.

[jason.oliveira]

This application is a tool that adds or removes users or groups from /etc/passwd and /etc/group automatically, reducing the need to do that with custom scripting in pre- post- and whatever script run by the package.

So, like every other Red Hat-funded application since https://www.linux.co.cr/distribution...linuxconf.html, it's a complicated widget to control or modify text files that are better-off hand-edited. I'll stick with useradd, thanks.

[edmon]

Fails to see what problem is being solved by this feature.

java devs doesnt understand security and resource managment and thus someone have to solve the issues that they constantly create. better create sys user for their application and set security constraints because otherwise they usually crash the systems.... hahahah

[rtfazeberdee]

So, like every other Red Hat-funded application since https://www.linux.co.cr/distribution...linuxconf.html, it's a complicated widget to control or modify text files that are better-off hand-edited. I'll stick with useradd, thanks.

thats is your choice as its optional (like most of systemd functionality) but not sure why you want to even consider a risky "hand-edit" when you could be using one of those complicated widgets like useradd.