Re: Killed wrong proc!

[Tim Nelson]

On Thu, 29 Sep 2004, Ted Zlatanov wrote:

> On Wed, 29 Sep 2004, architect@webalive.biz wrote:
>
> > Hmm.  I think Redhat wants you to use "service httpd start" or
> > whatever.  There are also a variety of other actions, such as reload and
> > status which could be useful.  However, unfortunately, the whole thing is
> > pretty non-standardised :).
>
> If /etc/init.d doesn't work properly in Redhat, that's news to me.

        It does.  In retrospect, I made a stupid comment :).

> I stopped using it (for Debian) when the FC switch happened, and was
> not aware of a difference.
>
> Maybe cfengine can have an option to do "service" commands, but it
> seems silly if /etc/init.d works just fine.  What's next, Redhat
> will discover daemontools? :)
>
> The reason why I only used "start" and "stop" in my example is
> because those are the only standard options to /etc/init.d scripts
> AFAIK.
>
> If I'm ignorant of any standards in this regard, I would appreciate
> some pointers.  Unix startup/shutdown scripts seem to be stable
> relative to a SysV hierarchy these days, with almost no pure
> BSD-style startup/shutdowns, but I'm not aware of a standard.

        There is now:

http://refspecs.freestandards.org/LSB_2.0.0/LSB-Core/LSB-Core/iniscrptact.html

	It doesn't specify a lot.  On the other hand, if you want to know 
what the generally accepted standards are, get a machine with as much 
installed as possible, and do things like this:

$ ls /etc/init.d/* | wc
    121     121    2353

$ egrep -h '^[ A-Za-z]+\)' /etc/init.d/* | perl -ne 
'if(s/^\s*([A-Za-z]+)\).*/$1/){print}
    106 stop
    104 status
    104 start
     95 condrestart
     47 restart
     32 reload
      3 save
      3 probe
      3 panic
      1 top
      1 redebug
      1 propagate
      1 nis
      1 flush
      1 files
      1 debug
      1 deactivate
      1 configtest
      1 check
      1 activate
      1 abort

	...as we can see, status is as standard as start.  restart 
(usually stop + start) and reload (usually something like
killall -HUP) are also fairly popular.  After that, you get a variety of 
exciting options, but unfortunately none of them are standard.

> Anyhow, I think cfengine should support /etc/init.d scripts as an
> option in processes: because that's at least 90% of the Unix systems
> out there, and it's better to start a process that way (stop; start)
> than sending a signal directly to the process.  The signal handling
> differs among implementations, for one.

        I agree :).

--
Tim Nelson
Server Administrator
WebAlive Technologies Global
Level 1 Innovation Building, Digital Harbour
1010 LaTrobe Street
Docklands, Melbourne, 
Vic, 3008
Phone: +61 3 9934 0812
Fax: +61 3 9934 0899
E-mail: tim.nelson@webalive.biz
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