[wplug] runlevel question

Hagbard Celine hceline at softhome.net
Fri Jan 17 18:43:14 EST 2003


> Easy to forget which one linux is, because it is both.
> Redhat and Mandrake distributions are SysV style init, but
> Slackware is BSD style.
> 
> At the risk of starting a flamewar, I always prefer
> Slackware distributions, and absolutely despise having to
> do anything with Redhat. However, runlevels are the one
> thing that I feel that Redhat made the right choice with
> going SysV.  SysV is much easier automate changes for,
> since pretty much each daemon get's it's own
> start,stop,restart script.  BSD style seems to lump to many
> things into one script.  For example:  the mounting of nfs
> partitions, starting of inetd, starting of named, and
> starting of routed are all done from one single script.
> 
At the risk of raising your hackles, you're refering to the boot script scheme
rather than the flavor of init, and Slackware does, indeed, use a BSD-style
boot script scheme.

I suppose that boot scripts are, like just about everything else, a matter of
preference.  I am one of the many who cut their teeth on Slackware, but when
I designed my general system configuration, I went with the SysV boot scripts
because I found them so much easier to tailor than the BSD type.  I'm currently
running four Linux boxes, no two of which do quite the same thing.  Despite the
differences, however, I can drop essentially the same /etc/init.d directory on
all of them (with very minor script editing for such host-specific items as IP
address), set the appropriate symlinks in the rc*.d directories, and I'm done.
This requires a bit less key-tapping than would editing the BSD-type scripts
for each machine.

At the end of it all, though, my chicken paprikasz tastes the same, whichever
scheme I use :o)

Hagbard




More information about the wplug mailing list