# service-module: runtime management fails for systemd **URL:** \ **Category:** Ansible Project\ **Tags:** ansible-project\ **Created:** [February 7, 2013, 11:03am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/service-module-runtime-management-fails-for-systemd/12303 "2013-02-07T11:03:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Arne\_Jacobs](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9f8e36/32.png) [@Arne\_Jacobs](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Arne_Jacobs)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2013, 11:03am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/service-module-runtime-management-fails-for-systemd/12303/1 "2013-02-07T11:03:57Z")
Why not go one step further and separate this into different modules, like with the package management modules? When using the service module I was asking myself if it was designed to work with various Linux distributions (it did work in my case). Separate modules would make that more obvious... ---
**Author:** ![Simon\_Campese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/dec6dc/32.png) [@Simon\_Campese](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Simon_Campese)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2013, 6:56pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/service-module-runtime-management-fails-for-systemd/12303/2 "2013-02-07T18:56:15Z")
It actually has been designed to work with various Linux (and BSDish) distributions and I guess the reason for this is easier scalability as one does not have to distinguish between the host operating systems in the playbooks. In general, I prefer your solution of separate modules for each way of managing services but this has several implications for administering heterogeneous environments. For example, systemd’s ‘systemctl’ tool supports enabling/disabling a service as well as controlling it (start/stop/reload/restart) while on many distributions, the enable/disable part is done by one tool (‘update-rc.d’, ‘chkconfig’, etc.) and controlling by another (‘initctl’, ‘service’ or by just calling the script from /etc/init.d directly). So in the end, the separate modules would merely be command wrappers… I think it’s best to check inside the service module which service-management solution is available on the host (i.e. systemctl, chkconfig/service etc.) but to be honest, I don’t like the way it’s done at the moment (lots of if-statements to build up the correct command line). I’ll give some more thought to it over the weekend and hope to come up with a satisfying solution.