[NCLUG] Startup Scripts

[Matt Taggart]

Sean Reifschneider writes...

> Debian-based systems I usually will manually add symlinks, because I can
> never seem to get update-rc.d to do the right thing for me, and certainly
> not as easily to remember as making the links.

update-rc.d foo defaults

(where foo is the name of the script you put in /etc/init.d/) is usually what 
you want.

> SuSE uses a dynamic startup mechanism that calculates dependencies at boot
> time depending on the comments in the headers.  I haven't looked at the URL
> that taggart pointed to, but they may be using that format.  In theory this
> should be nice and easy to figure out, but I always have to spend a lot of
> time poking at it to get it right.  It's kind of nice that you don't need
> the rc*.d directories though.

The LSB is a developer standard, what developers can expect to be able to use 
on an LSB compliant system, and the point of the init script stuff is so that 
a developer (or in this case a sysadmin developing their own scripts) can 
provide a script and have it installed on the system independent of the init 
implementation. So the LSB runtime could be using sysvinit, some parallel init 
implementation, or anything else they want behind the scenes as long as they 
support the LSB interfaces.

> On OpenSolaris you have to provide an XML file which describes the service.
> This has the added benefit that you just define the dependencies and it
> deals with the rest, including sequencing and parallel execution, but it
> also provides service restart.  It's called SMF, if you want to check out
> more about it.  It's kind of complicated, but it's great for serious system
> administration.

I bet the LSB standard would allow for that sort of implementation. That would 
be neat to have in Linux distros, although maybe it's license is too 
restrictive? I wish the CDDL was GPL compatible, it would be neat to use some 
stuff from OpenSolaris.

> SMF is also nice because it can tell you things about why a service isn't
> running.  I had disabled xinetd on a server because I had no services I
> wanted published via that, but then sshd stopped working.  I asked SMF
> about it and it said "Hey, need xinetd running".  As soon as I enabled
> xinetd, SSH restarted.

That sounds really nice, too bad Sun is keeping it to themselves. Their choice 
I guess. Maybe someone will clone it. I still hold out hope that Sun makes the 
CDDL GPL compatible...

-- 
Matt Taggart
matt at lackof.org