Hacker's ramblings

In couple past posts of mine, I've instructed people to do alter systemd service descriptions. Examples from Randomness in computers and Handling /run with systemd. As we all know, systemd is quite a beast. It just keeps on giving complexity as we stumble along trying to grasp all of it.

For example:
To add more command arguments to rngd.service, you can do what I instructed earlier. You can copy /usr/lib/systemd/system/rngd.service to /etc/systemd/system/, edit the file and do a systemctl daemon-reload to update the changes.

If you want to choose more systemd'ic (Python developers always say "pythonic") way, you can do a:

systemctl edit rngd

This command will open a text-editor. The editor is your default one from EDITOR environment variable, or if you haven't picked one, a default will be chosen for you by your favorite Linux distro vendor.

What you should make the text file contain, is following three (3) lines:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/sbin/rngd -f --rng-device=/dev/TrueRNG --fill-watermark=4000

Those lines will re-define service description. First by clearing out the previous value(s) and then defining a new one. On save, this setting will take automatically effect and you don't have to do anything else. Also, this setting is persisted in a file called /etc/systemd/system/rngd.service.d/override.conf. Of course, you can create that particular file yourself, but then the familiar systemctl daemon-reload is needed to make your changes stick.

Nice and easy!