A plague of daemons and the Unix Philosophy

Ted Roche tedroche at tedroche.com
Sun Nov 11 15:23:54 EST 2007


Ben Scott wrote:

>   In Fedora 8, a daemon has shown up called "ConsoleKit".  The job of
> this daemon is apparently to track login sessions.  Why on God's green
> Earth do we need a daemon -- an always running background process --
> for this?  It could just as easily be done using library routines that
> get invoked only when needed (i.e., login, logout, user switch, etc.).

I believe ConsoleKit was introduced to support multiple user desktop
switching. Your Google-Foo is powerful; I'm sure you'll see it, too. I
think it's the "Fast" part of User Switching that's the issue; stuff
resident in memory tracking each session? Could there be stateful stuff
(excuse the technical terms) that wouldn't be appropriate to script?

> ... More and more of these things appear with each
> release... Even worse, this functionality is apparently broken.

"At the moment we chown the device node for certain devices to the user
of the unprivileged desktop session. In a f-u-s scenario with two users
logged in, A and B, the last one to log in wins. Hence, when switching
back to the first session, some devices are now not accessible."

"Proposed fix is to use ACL's on device nodes; hence more than one user
can own the device node."

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/FastUserSwitching (this page is
marked up as Fedora 7; unclear if further work has gone on...

Is this a case of "Those who fail to learn from Windows are doomed to
reinvent it?" It does look like they're trying to lift the OS X feature,
but from the wiki page it doesn't look all that well considered.

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com




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