Re: Seeking help with OpenVPN scripts and systemd

[Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org>]

Alberto,

I think you might be too deep in sysvinit paradigms how we did (hack)
things before.

I personally think that mapping the functionality 1:1 is a wrong
approach because you will end up in some impossible scenario in the end
anyway.

I think the better way how to convert openvpn to systemd would be:

to convert all AUTOSTART= VPNs to openvpn@ enabled instances and all
other to disabled openvpn@ instances at upgrade time. I guess there
might be a need to some more subtle tweaking, but I think you can
autoconvert most of the old configuration this way.

So I would suggest to write down all current use cases and write down a
solution for sysvinit and systemd for each of the use cases. The mapping
"problem" -> "solution" could be more helpful than "current solution" ->
"new solution".

I don't think it's needed to support "I drop new configuration" and it
get's picked automatically, but if you think it's needed, I think you
can prepare openvpn.script that would:

a) make a note which openvpn@ instances are autoconfigured (probably by
having openvpn-auto@.service)
b) walk through all AUTOSTART configurations and instantiate
openvpn-auto@.service for each new configuration (not already managed by
openvpn@.service
c) when configuration disappears remove the auto-enabled
openvpn-auto@.service

In that way you will have:

openvpn@.service # manually managed
openvpn-auto@.service # automanaged
openvpn.service # service script to manage opevpn-auto@.service(s)

How does that sounds?

Cheers,
-- 
Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org>
Knot DNS (https://www.knot-dns.cz/) – a high-performance DNS server