tinc initialization (in both Red Hat and Debian families)

[Guus Sliepen]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 05:51:30PM +0300, Răzvan Sandu wrote:

> Taking into account that both Red Hat and Debian (8.x) families now use
> systemd, there is, IMHO, one small. but important correction to be done:
> tinc's initialization.
> 
> IMHO, we need:
> 
> 1. A proper tinc.service file, included by default (prepackaged) in the
> stock .deb and .rpm packages in Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, etc.
> 
> By "proper" I mean it will start tinc at the correct time during system's
> initialization, have proper permissions, etc.

I agree. I would like it to follow systemd's way of doing things as much
of possible. For example, in order to support multiple tinc daemons
running, I'd like to use unit instances, so one can say:

systemctl start tinc at NETNAME.service

Where NETNAME is passed to tincd using the -n option of course. So that
means no more nets.boot. Anyone having any ideas about this?

> 2. On Red Hat systems, an /etc/sysconfig/tinc file, as a standard place to
> pass initialization parameters to the tincd daemon. For example, the
> network name (-n) to be used.
> 
> A similar configuration file should exist in Debian, but I'm less familiar
> with the Debian initialization scheme.

I'm not too fond of supporting distribution specific stuff in tinc
upstream. As mentioned above, the netname issue can be handled by
systemd using instances. As for other parameters, I know it is possible
to specify a file with the format VARIABLE=VALUE and have it read by
systemd, so you can use those variables in the unit files. It works with
Debian's /etc/default/tinc more or less. I don't know about Red Hat's
sysconfig files. Or I might add some extra configuration options to tinc
for those command line switches that do not have a configuration file
equivalent.

-- 
Met vriendelijke groet / with kind regards,
     Guus Sliepen <guus at tinc-vpn.org>
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