autodeath

When I saw Paul Fenwick's blog on autodie my soul leapt towards Nirvana, since I've wanted an autodie facility in Linux for a long time. Then I read the article and found it wasn't what I thought it was at all.

Let me explain.

Linux works. So some people don't update it. There's nothing wrong with that -- unless the machine on the Internet. In that case older and unsupported machines are very vulnerable to misuse. There's a lot of those machines about. I unplugged a machine running Red Hat Linux 5.2 the other day.

I'd love for all distributions to ship with an autodeath cron job. Ship the operating system with an expected expiry date, when that date arrives delete any default route. If the vendor extends maintenance then they can update the autodeath package as part of that maintenance. Similarly for an distribution "legacy" maintenance project.

Deleting the default route is sufficient. Standalone machines won't have a default route, so autodeath will have no effect, which sounds correct. Internet-connected machines will lose Internet connectivity, which sounds right. Especially if booting into single user mode and manually starting the network still works so the machine's owner has a path to doing a network-based OS upgrade.

Update, April 2014

I wrote a e-mail to the Fedora Development list when they were discussing this idea.

Seth Vidal has written system-autodeath for Fedora. Thanks Seth.