[TriLUG] Debian vs. Fedora start-up

[Rick DeNatale]

On 7/13/06, Brian Henning <brian at strutmasters.com> wrote:
> Hiya gang.
>
> For the longest time, I thought "SysV"-style init specifically meant the
> sort of init that looked like this (like on RH-based distros):
>
> Starting some_odd_service                   [  OK  ]
> Starting doomed_to_fail_server              [FAILED]
>
> ..and that Debian's init was "something else" (I didn't know a name):
>
> Starting mail agent: exim4
> Starting something else: somethingelsed
>
> But just now, I read something that called Debian's initscripts "...a
> clean implementation of SysV boot scripts..." so now I'm not so sure.
>
> Would someone mind eplaining the difference?  Furthermore, is it hard
> (or possible) to put the former [  OK  ]/[FAILED] -style init on a
> Debian installation?  Either that, or is there an aptitude for RPM-based
> distributions?  For me, that's the major battle between a .deb-based
> distro vs. an RPM-based one.  Aptitude beats yum hands-down, IMHO, but I
> like the [  OK  ] sort of init much better; it's cleaner to my eye.
>
> So, if anyone can point me in the right direction to getting the best of
> both worlds, I'll be eternally in your debt (or at least will buy you a
> $drink). :-)


SysV init style isn't really about the format of messages. It's about
configuring the init process via /etc/inittab, and having runlevels,
this is in contrast to the BSD style which puts the control in a
single script file /etc/rc.

SysV init makes reconfiguration and adding services much more modular.

Both Redhat and Debian based distros use SysV style init.  Those
messages you are seeing are coming out of the init scripts in
/etc/init.d. There's typically a script for each service. Most of
those use functions in a script containing init helper functions to do
things like actually starting and stopping the daemons, and formatting
log messages. For Ubuntu, and probably other debian distros, that
helper script is in /lib/lsb/init-functions, which provides an
interface for init scripts which follows the specification in the
Linux standard base:

http://refspecs.freestandards.org/LSB_3.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/iniscrptfunc.html

The spec doesn't say how messages should be formatted, so I guess you
could hack /lib/lsb/init-functions, but to me it seems like much ado
about nothing.



-- 
Rick DeNatale

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http://ipmsr12.denhaven2.com/

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