[systemd-devel] specialized user sessions for running large processes

[Andrei Borzenkov]

02.10.2018 19:52, Mantas Mikulėnas пишет:
> On Tue, Oct 2, 2018 at 4:44 PM Thomas Blume <Thomas.Blume at suse.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> there is some large software like SAP or Oracle out there that need to
>> be started/stopped via special users.
>>
> 
> What exactly do you mean by "via special users", and why is that? Anything
> that a "special user" can start, a .service unit can start directly too.
> (Perhaps not the nicest-looking .service unit, but that is besides the
> point.)
> 

SAP installation is done under dedicated (normally non-system) user; a
lot of configuration is defined in ~/.profile (or ~/.login depending on
user shell) and similar shell startup files; without sourcing these
files it is basically impossible to get working environment. So
traditionally SAP processes were started by "su - sidadm -c startsap" or
similar - the main objective is having login shell that sources startup
files.

Please do not start telling that it can be done differently. Until SAP
implements *SUPPORTED* different solution (startup files are maintained
by SAP installer automatically among other things) using login shell is
the only supported way to use SAP.

It may be possible to use something like "sh -l -c ..." but it still
must be explicitly supported by vendor. I do not know if SAP supports this.

> I am nowhere near being an Oracle database/anything admin, but we do have a
> server successfully starting Oracle 11 XE via systemd and there haven't
> been any problems with it for over two years. The only really special
> config it needs is "RemoveIPC=no" in logind.conf...
> 

Oracle is just one of many databases that can be used by SAP and there
are application servers and a lot of other components.