Which Style Init Scripts Do You Prefer?

An anonymous reader asks: "I started using Linux years ago, with a Red Hat distribution. When Red Hat's custom configurations started getting in my way, I jumped ship to Slackware. I have never looked back except that I cannot stand the BSD style init scripts. I like having a full compliment of run-levels and control on the fly over which scripts will be running, and which ones will not. That is hard to achieve, when you put multiple configurations in the same file. I also liked having the scripts around to start, stop, and restart services. While I was rewriting my own startup scripts [based on Debian's scripts], I discovered that there is a third style, based on dependencies. AFAIK this is the style adopted by Gentoo. I don't want to start a distro war; but, I am curious about what kind of init scripts Slashdot readers prefer, and what they think are the benefits of each."

Comments

Two things I hate about gentoo and on topic.

[SmallFurryCreature]

One is that on every emerge portage a number of configurations changes are made that are pointless. Like a change of the number of spaces in /etc/fstab. 1. who cares if there are two or three tabs between options? 2. /etc/fstab will always be different for the user anyway since the default one has nonsense values.

Anyway on to the init. I do sorta like the init system except the use of the stop-start-daemon. Works fine if everything has well but is as a dumb piece of shit when it doesn't. Will happily insist that something is running when it isn't or that it isn't when it is. Have for some services now changed the scripts to stop using that crap anyway.

Have asked this on the gentoo forum but noone so far has given me a reason let alone a good reason why the stop-start-daemon is used at all. Especially for stuff like apache where the gentoo initscript has less options then apachectl has.

Anyway rebooting just to see the init scripts seems a bit, odd. Kinda like saying you like windows crashes because of the cool splash screen. Get a girl :)

But if you ever do an emerge -u portage and then etc-update make sure you know what you are doing. A lot of the updates you can simply do EXCEPT for the files wich you may have changed. Problem is you may have forgotten and then you could really break something. I had it happen once when I accidently overwrote the net configuration. No a smart move on a remote machine. Noticed it only after hosting provided added hardware and then rebooted it as a very secure server (no netaccess).

Slackware's init

[c.r.o.c.o]

You will pry the Slackware init scripts from my cold dead hands!

On a more serious note, I had always run Slackware on my gateways (about 6 years total), so I know the scripts pretty much inside and out. I have a lot of very specialised scripts that I wrote from scratch tailored specifically for my gateway and home network. But on my workstation I tried a variety of distribuitons, and for a very long time I ran RedHat (from rh4.2 to rh7.3.), mainly because I enjoyed constantly upgrading rpms and trying out new things.

I ran into the same problem you did around the time RedHad came out with rh8.0. I found it amost impossible to track every config file in /etc, because of RedHat's non-standard installation. Not to mention the mass of files in /etc and all over the hdd that I had NO ideea what their purpose was. At that point I realised that the advantage of rpms was far outweighed by the horrible system management in RedHat. Then I tried pretty much all distros out there, and I finally settled on Slackware for my workstation and laptop as well.

I happen to like the BSD style scripts. They make maintainance a breeze, and they almost never need to be changed. Even when I reinstall Slack (for whatever reason, last time it was a hdd starting to fail), I find that most scripts and config files can just be copied over to the new distro. I actually had a masquarading script that lasted me from kernel 2.0.20 untill 2.4.x was released.

So there you have it, I _love_ the Slack init scripts. I'm not sure there are much better ones out there in terms of simplicity and complete control. Sure, maybe RedHat's linuxconf (is that thing still around?) may make changing stuff and automation easier, but at a significant loss of control. And God forbit you fubar linuxconf's dependencies so you can't run it. Then you'll really appreciate Slackware.

BSD-style

[ctr2sprt]

The thing I like most about BSD-style scripts is that they don't insist on starting and killing daemons one at a time. They also allow for asymmetric scripts, sort of; Linux tends to kill every service individually on shutdown, which is really annoying because it takes forever. 99.9% of programs can handle kill -TERM -1 && sleep 5 && kill -KILL -1, which init does automatically when it changes runlevels. I guess it's nothing inherent in SysV-style scripts I dislike; it's the way they're used.

I don't think the lack of "/etc/init.d/daemon stop" is that big a disadvantage. "killall daemon" works just as well - in fact, that's all most stop scripts do. The only thing you lose is the pretty color graphics.

This is definitely prime material for a religious war, though, as neither approach offers any real benefit. You can easily make either approach do whatever you want. With SysV-style scripts, it's slightly easier to let packages say how they should be started; with BSD-style scripts, it's slightly easier to understand the "big picture."

init scripts are ESPECIALLY important

[T-Ranger]

It forces you to save your configuration. And being forced to save your configuration might get you to think about it in an orderd and structured way before you do so. If you reboot every other day then you will catch (or resolve) these problems when they are still fresh in your mind.

If you regularly have long uptimes you will fall into the trap of just doing things from the command line, but never 'saving' that anywhere. If you dont force yourself to use init scripts, then more often then never you will simply run an obscure - but very important command - and it wont be carried out on the next reboot. If you typed it in a week ago you might remember it, and remember the man page (and possibly even have it in your shells history file). If you typed it in 6mo ago you might have compleatly forgeten it. You might waste 5 minutes relearning it, but you might waste 5 hours too.

A varriation on "laziness is a virtue".

Re:FreeBSD 5's RCng

[Otter]

(And yes, this is quite similar to Gentoo's system, except that Gentoo translates the scripts into actual runlevels behind the scenes, whereas the BSDs do not. That, and this doesn't use python.)

I'm a Gentoo fan, not because of the (mostly imaginary) performance advantages, but because to my taste, it's the easiest Linux to maintain once it's up and running. That's largely from portage, but it's also the only Linux on which I've found the init system to not be an enormous pain in the butt.

The SysV system may well have advantages for knowledgeable admins -- but as a user who just wants ntp to run properly, Gentoo has been a blessing. (Also, I don't believe the Gentoo system uses Python. The parent may be thinking of portage, or I may just be wrong.)