Plurrrr

My last post on this topic caught some attention, so I’m going to continue exploring some of the systemd features that may be useful to people writing network services. Here are some more things about socket activation I didn’t cover in the previous post.

Firstly, it’s not something that needs a binding to a specific library to work (although systemd does make one available for this task). It uses conventions that already exist in Unix, and have done for a long time. The network sockets are presented as file descriptors, and some information about them as environment variables.

On many Linux systems, systemd-journald runs as a daemon at boot and collects your logs. You can access them through journalctl but it turns out journald is a lot more complicated then just sending something to a text file. I’ll look at two main things here: What kind of information is included in a journald entry and how these entries get from programs to journald.

It's often said that the internet has democratized education: the sum of human knowledge is only a Google search away! And yet, having access to information is only half of the story; you also need to be able to convert raw information into usable skills.