seat-inspect

Tue, 10 Feb 2015 17:06:43 -0000
debian, eng, pdo, sw, truelite

Four months ago I wrote this somewhere:

Seeing a DD saying "this new dbus stuff scares me" would make most debian users scared. Seeing a DD who has an idea of what is going on, and who can explain it, would be an interesting and exciting experience.

So, let's be exemplary, competent and patient. Or at least, competent. Some may like or not like the changes, but do we all understand what is going on? Will we all be able to support our friends and customers running jessie?

I confess that although I understand the need for it, I don't feel competent enough to support systemd-based machines right now.

So, are we maybe in need of help, cheat sheets, arsenals of one-liners, diagnostic tools?

Maybe a round of posts on -planet like "one debian package a day" but with new features that jessie will have, and how to understand them and take advantage of them?

That was four months ago. In the meantime, I did some work, and it got better for me.

Yesterday, however, I've seen an experienced Linux person frustrated because the shutdown function of the desktop was doing nothing whatsoever. Today I found John Goerzen's post on planet.

I felt like some more diagnostic tools were needed, so I spent the day making seat-inspect.

seat-inspect tries to make the status of the login/seat system visible, to help with understanding and troubleshooting.

The intent of running the code is to have an overview of the system status, both to see what the new facilities are about, and to figure out if there is something out of place.

The intent of reading the code is to have an idea of how to use these facilities: the code has been written to be straightforward and is annotated with relevant bits from the logind API documentation.

seat-inspect is not a finished tool, but a starting point. I put it on github hoping that people will fork it and add their own extra sanity checks and warnings, so that it can grow into a standard thing to run if a system acts weird.

As it is now, it should be able to issue warnings if some bits are missing for network-manager or shutdown functions to work correctly. I haven't really tested that, though, because I don't have a system at hand where they are currently not working fine.

Another nice thing of it is that when running seat-inspect -v you get a dump of what logind/consolekit think about your system. I found it an interesting way to explore the new functionalities that we recently grew. The same can be done, and in more details, with loginctl calls, but I lacked a summary.

After writing this I feel a bit more competent, probably enough to sit at somebody's computer and poke into loginctl bits. I highly recommend the experience.