Alpine OS / getting rid of systemd

Hi, I just tilted and decided I'm definitively over with systemd sh**, so I will get rid of this nasty evil beast across all the infrastructures I manage. In the process I would like to switch from Debian to Alpine Linux but the point is Cloudmin/Virtualmin support. Do you guys consider it and what is your view on the feasibility of the use of Alpine with Cloudmin/Virtualmin ?

Status: 
Closed (works as designed)

Comments

I, too, had some rude awakenings this last week about systemd... after deciding that maybe it was just all hype, I got a new server and found that you can really restart networking without a reboot (see references below).

ifupdown and systemd don't play well together
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=565187

networking restart, doesn't work, need to reboot
https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/7nw98g/seriously_restarting_net...

Possible solutions:
-- either use systemd-networkd
-- or Network-Manager
https://linuxhint.com/restart_networking_debian_linux/

On older Debian 8 Wheezy and older installs, we could just make a change to /etc/network/interfaces and then "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart" would work.

But, with Debian 9 and systemd, that no longer works due to a bug.

Howdy -- thanks for contacting us!

While we do appreciate that some folks aren't fans of systemd, it takes an incredible amount of work to provide support for a new distribution.

It's taken months for us to fully support Ubuntu 18.04, which is just an update to a distribution we already support.

It would likely take even longer than that to build support for a new distribution that we're not familiar with; and maintenance for that each time a new version comes out can be similarly problematic.

It's just the 4 of us here, we unfortunately don't really have the resources for a project for that.

The two cases where I could see that changing --

One, if there's a critical mass of people using a particular distribution, especially in the web hosting or server realm.

Two, if an organization offers to fund development and maintenance for a given distribution.

I wish I had an awesomer answer! But I unfortunately don't see support for a new distribution anytime soon, barring one of the above two options.

Thanks for your answers guys. @jimdunn : You pointed out one of the issues that fueled the decision to ditch systemd. I'm afraid the "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart" would kill the remote connection to the server. Would you really take the risk to run that command on a remote production-critical system ? I certainly won't.

@andreychek : I fully understand your answer. Now my question is more about the feasibility to use the Cloudmin automation with an unsupported distro. I mean Virtualmin can be deployed manually on almost any Linux system, so be it Alpine or another I trust we can make it run an then make a Cloudmin image from it, right ? Then if Virtualmin is running in the OS Cloudmin I think would be able to monitor, update, stop and start it, what's your view about that ?

Also another path to get back to a more sane OS environment while keeping the max compatibility with Debian would be to go the Devuan way, wouldn't it be a minimal work to support Devuan when you already support the corresponding Debian distro ?

It's no problem to run any distribution you like as a Cloudmin guest... it's even possible to run Windows there.

Sorry, I don't think we're going to have Devuan support anytime soon though.

OK, thanks for the confirmation. When you say Cloudmin guest, do you mean via Cloudmin connect or through Virtualmin GPL or Pro ? What would exactly the guest requires for which functionalities ?

To get the most out of Cloudmin Connect, you'd need to be running Virtualmin on the guest.

However, Cloudmin Pro itself can do most management so long as it's able to run Linux commands, or possibly access Webmin, on the guest OS.

So if it were running Windows, you won't be able to perform many management tasks (perhaps just starting and stopping the VM from within Cloudmin). However, if it's running Linux, you should be able to do most management Cloudmin has available.

I too would like to express my support for Devuan. I also hope you guys at Virtualmin are realistic about the chance that Canonical may, in a year or two, be totally impractical for users outside their cloud-sphere.

Canonical is married to O-S, or the very least betting big.. they have a stack in place with MAAS, Juju, CoreOS, snaps, etc. IF you put this side by side with Devuan it should be clear that the latter has a fraction of the technology which could take off into all sort of directions, dragging Virtualmin with it. i might be paranoid here, but nobody is dead wrong when looking at probabilities.

When you wrote Devuan is not likely to happen - did you guys considered this from all angle? I am here to figure this Cloudmin / Virtualmin thing out so I can start making and supporting them, and I already decided to use Devaun everywhere I possibly can, due to its no-affiliation status. Today to me that is Devuan's greatest asset, and you might want to give it a revisit based on the same.

Again, i am just a mechanical engineer and i do not know much about software, politics and technology so be easy on me for giving my doubts away.

We support CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, and Debian at the moment.

Your interest in Duvean has been noted!

We're not looking to add it as a supported OS for Virtualmin at this time, but we'll certainly continue to keep an eye on the OS/distro landscape, and may make adjustments in the future.

Just to keep you updated on this topic, I recently deployed a bunch of virtualization servers and integrated them in our Cloudmin-managed pool. Following the advices on this thread as to the support level of Debian, I went the 'safe' way of Debian 9 for the physical systems since I had no time to experiment for now. Now it ended up a quagmire with script unable to configure the Debian properly due to systemd blocking the way and in the end the base OS is totally unable to get integrated and configured by Virtualmin due mainly to networking config issues. I had found a possible workaround consisting of rewriting the systemd config into a sysvinit-like config so Virtualmin would see the proper config but then it would require me to manually report any change from a config to the other... At this point I decided I have much better use for my time, the best one being giving a try to a proper OS like Devuan for a physical virtualization platform. Now guess what ? It worked like a charm ! Much better than the systemd crap. Cloudmin pro install script completed smoothly and I ended up with a working system. I noticed some room for improvement but I will post about that later.

I was able to integrate the new system with the existing Cloudmin master with no hassle.

So clearly there is no doubt : Devuan ascii is a much better working system for Cloudmin than Debian 9 ! I would like to have followed my intuition and go the Devuan way from the start, it would have saved me some long painful working hours :)

I hope my trials would help others, don't hesitate to give Devuan ascii a spin, just use Cloudmin Debian 9 installer since it's the same codebase and packages except for the init.

Yeah, even Debian 9 is pretty new and may have bugs to work out - the previous release is likely to be more stable.

Sure but the amazing point is that Devuan is more solid and smooth than Debian/systemd.

We will see in time the amount of bloat systemd introduces.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! We'll definitely keep that in mind.

Due to the cost in time and resources to support a new distro, we're not looking to add support for one unless demand for it becomes similar to demand for our other supported distros, or, someone funds the development for it.

In the meantime, we'll go ahead and mark this as closed. Thanks again for your thoughts!

I know it's closed, but I would also love devuan or sysvinit support with debian. I don't run systemd on any of my servers, and I would like to continue to do so. I may have to deal with it with virtualmin, but if there's any way you could resurrect sysvinit support, we would be extremely grateful!

Note that Webmin will automatically detect if you are running systemd, upstart or classic init, regardless of which distribution you're running.

Hi, I concur you can run Virtualmin/Cloudmin on Devuan, I switched all my infrastructure from Debian to Devuan and it actually works better and smoothier than with Debian without systemd.

Only thing is you may have to change Devuan ascii to Debian 9 in /etc/os-release so the automatic detection of Virtualmin installer works.

You can get back to the original /etc/os-release once the installation is done.

Oh! I didn't think to try that! Thanks so much lorelin! If it's that simple maybe they can add an install note or something…