This is necessary to prevent a race. Udev 197 has a new naming scheme
for network devices, so it will rename (say) eth0 to eno0. This fails
with "error changing net interface name eth0 to eno1: Device or
resource busy" if another process has opened the interface in the
meantime.
During a configuration switch, changed units are stopped in the old
configuration, then started in the new configuration (i.e. after
running the activation script and running "systemctl daemon-reload").
This ensures that services are stopped using the ExecStop/ExecStopPost
commands from the old configuration.
However, for some services it's undesirable to stop them; in
particular dhcpcd, which deconfigures its network interfaces when it
stops. This is dangerous when doing remote upgrades - usually things
go right (especially because the switch script ignores SIGHUP), but
not always (see 9aa69885f04969e5d31dcb8265c327adc908954e). Likewise,
sshd should be kept running for as long as possible to prevent a
lock-out if the switch fails.
So the new option ‘stopIfChanged = false’ causes "systemctl restart"
to be used instead of "systemctl stop" followed by "systemctl start".
This is only proper for services that don't have stop commands. (And
it might not handle dependencies properly in some cases, but I'm not
sure.)
Running it from systemd rather than cron has several advantages:
systemd ensures that only one instance runs at a time; the GC can be
manually started/stopped; and logging goes to the journal.
We still need cron to start the service at the right time, but
hopefully soon we can get rid of cron entirely (once systemd supports
starting a unit at a specific time).
Charon needs this to include the dynamically generated
/root/.vbox-charon-client-key. (We used
users.extraUsers.root.openssh.authorizedKeys.keyFiles for this, but
that no longer works.)
Instead of the somewhat hacky script that inserted public keys
into the users' .ssh/authorized_keys files, use the AuthorizedKeysFile
configuration directive in sshd_config and generate extra key
files for each user (placed in /etc/authorized_keys.d/).
The xsession script runs services that depend on a sane environment. Gpg-agent, for
example, runs the program "pinentry-gtk-2" to obtain the password to unlock GnuPG
and SSH keys. That program will display only gibberish unless $FONTCONFIG_FILE is
configured properly. Instead of configuring these variables explicitly one by one,
we just source /etc/profile, which contains the appropriate @shellInit@ code.
Thus
networking.interfaces = [ { name = "eth0"; ipAddress = "192.168.15.1"; } ];
can now be written as
networking.interfaces.eth0.ipAddress = "192.168.15.1";
The old notation still works though.
