On 5/20/06, Leendert Meyer wrote:

BTW, doesn't xmms depend on X? If it can run without X, then no worries.

Nice answer, Leendert .. I have recently been learing about this, and it seems that you are right, and as long as skeleton is used as a template and the resulting script is left in /etc/init.d, then when chkconfig runs -- the sym links get added automagically to the rc<x>.d directories, and all is good. But, it seems to me that the init.d process is really intended for service daemons -- isn't xmms just an audio player? I think both KDE and GNOME have a method for "autostarting" user applications like xmms ... from the thread with subjec Amarok Audio Player: "n KDE if you want it to autostart just click on the link in the application menu, drag it into .kde/Autostart (opened in Konqueror) & choose 'Copy here' or 'Link here'." I'm not sure this is exhaustive, but it should point to a better way of auto-starting xmms. Peter

Leendert Meyer wrote:

1. Did you read /etc/init.d/README and /etc/init.d/skeleton? Also 'man insserv' (the 'DESCRIPTION' section) has usefull info.

2. The glue is /etc/init.d/rc. It calls the S??xxx scripts with the 'start' parameter, and the K??xxx with the stop parameter.

Dear Leendert, Thank you very much, I should have read the README before posting, but haven't formed that habit yet ;)... It do clarify much, now I am in process of understanding the skeleton...

The initscripts need to be in /etc/init.d by convention (LSB I think). Also, when creating a new service, it might be a good idea to start from /etc/init.d/skeleton. You do not need all of it, see the init.d/ directory for plenty of examples. ;)

I thought that it would not be quite difficult, but it seems I need more basic knowledge.

It seems Sergey unintentionally "disguised" his real problem well.

The problem wasn't actually to make xmms autostart with the boot, I was just trying to do something "on my own" with that scripts and starting xmms was the first thing which came to my mind. Can you point me some good documentation for it? Thank you very much, Regards, -- Sergey Mkrtchyan Scientific Researcher Department of Molecular Physics, Faculty of Physics, Yerevan State University Tel: (374-10) 55-43-41 Fax: (374-10) 57-76-89

On Saturday 20 May 2006 21:17, Sergey Mkrtchyan wrote:

Leendert Meyer wrote:

...

1. Did you read /etc/init.d/README and /etc/init.d/skeleton? Also 'man insserv' (the 'DESCRIPTION' section) has usefull info.

2. The glue is /etc/init.d/rc. It calls the S??xxx scripts with the 'start' parameter, and the K??xxx with the stop parameter.

Dear Leendert, Thank you very much, I should have read the README before posting, but haven't formed that habit yet ;)...

It wouldn't be a bad habit at all... ;P

...

It seems Sergey unintentionally "disguised" his real problem well.

The problem wasn't actually to make xmms autostart with the boot, I was just trying to do something "on my own" with that scripts and starting xmms was the first thing which came to my mind.

:) Hmm, xmms is not the easiest thing to start with, as it depends on X. And for which user should it run? Maybe better try to 'autorun' xmms from an Autostart directory as suggested in other messages in this thread. Why not start from the skeleton, change the start and stop sections to do something simple, like: echo "$(date +%FT%T%z): FOO started" >> /tmp/FOO.log and echo "$(date +%FT%T%z): FOO stopped" >> /tmp/FOO.log (log files normally would go to /var/log/, but since your playing, I think /tmp/ is better) Play a bit with the INIT INFO section, etc. and expand from there.

Can you point me some good documentation for it?

Carlos already provided you some docs. ;) Cheers, Leen

On Monday 22 May 2006 10:18, Sergey Mkrtchyan wrote:

Leendert Meyer wrote:

...

Why not start from the skeleton, change the start and stop sections to do something simple, like: echo "$(date +%FT%T%z): FOO started" >> /tmp/FOO.log and echo "$(date +%FT%T%z): FOO stopped" >> /tmp/FOO.log

(log files normally would go to /var/log/, but since your playing, I think /tmp/ is better)

Dear Leendert, I was playing these days with it, understood a lot, but again there is some small problems I have.

Here what I have done: In the skeleton I just changed the appropriate parts to

Here's a extremely minimalistic 'skeleton', stripped from comments: ----<cut here>---- #!/bin/sh ### BEGIN INIT INFO # Provides: FOO # Required-Start: $syslog $remote_fs # Should-Start: $time ypbind sendmail # Required-Stop: $syslog $remote_fs # Should-Stop: $time ypbind sendmail # Default-Start: 3 5 # Default-Stop: 0 1 2 6 # Short-Description: FOO XYZ daemon providing ZYX # Description: Start FOO to allow XY and provide YZ # continued on second line by '#<TAB>' # should contain enough info for the runlevel editor # to give admin some idea what this service does and # what it's needed for ... # (The Short-Description should already be a good hint.) ### END INIT INFO . /etc/rc.status rc_reset case "$1" in start) echo -n "Starting FOO " echo "$(date +%FT%T%z): FOO started" >> /tmp/FOO.log # false rc_status -v ;; stop) echo -n "Shutting down FOO " echo "$(date +%FT%T%z): FOO stopped" >> /tmp/FOO.log # false rc_status -v ;; restart) $0 stop $0 start rc_status ;; *) echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}" exit 1 ;; esac rc_exit ----<cut here>----

I am a newbie and got a very little experience with shell scripting,

Hmm, I assumed you know a bit of shell-script programming. However, if you're a programmer, you might learn it quickly (you know best if you could).

maybe I should leave this for a better times?

Well, you learning curve just got a bit steeper... ;) You might as well add 'man bash' to your RTFM list. But there are some shell-scripting tutorials on the net. However I can't recommend any, because I don't know any. ;) Here's a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash (I like Wikipedia more and more...). There are some links at the bottom that might interest you. Cheers, Leen

Carlos E. R. wrote:

There are also some howtos in the distro:

Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.gz Bash-Prompt-HOWTO.gz

(plus the html version). There is also an "advanced" howto, but it is not included.

Very sad, but seems they are absent in my one. there is one "docu" folder which contains RELEASE_NOTES.doc and rtf and folder "en" in which only two pdfs reference_en.pdf and startup_en.pdf. Regards, -- Sergey Mkrtchyan Scientific Researcher Department of Molecular Physics, Faculty of Physics, Yerevan State University Tel: (374-10) 55-43-41 Fax: (374-10) 57-76-89

Leendert Meyer wrote:

Here's a extremely minimalistic 'skeleton', stripped from comments:

----<cut here>---- #!/bin/sh ### BEGIN INIT INFO # Provides: FOO # Required-Start: $syslog $remote_fs # Should-Start: $time ypbind sendmail # Required-Stop: $syslog $remote_fs # Should-Stop: $time ypbind sendmail # Default-Start: 3 5 # Default-Stop: 0 1 2 6 # Short-Description: FOO XYZ daemon providing ZYX # Description: Start FOO to allow XY and provide YZ # continued on second line by '#<TAB>' # should contain enough info for the runlevel editor # to give admin some idea what this service does and # what it's needed for ... # (The Short-Description should already be a good hint.) ### END INIT INFO . /etc/rc.status rc_reset case "$1" in start) echo -n "Starting FOO " echo "$(date +%FT%T%z): FOO started" >> /tmp/FOO.log # false rc_status -v ;; stop) echo -n "Shutting down FOO " echo "$(date +%FT%T%z): FOO stopped" >> /tmp/FOO.log # false rc_status -v ;; restart) $0 stop $0 start rc_status ;; *) echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}" exit 1 ;; esac rc_exit ----<cut here>----

After a little problems it worked! really extremely helpfull, thank you!

However, if you're a programmer, you might learn it quickly (you know best if you could).

Actually my major is Biophysics, and that is what I am doing now, but have been in programming not a little time, so I think it will not be difficult. My problem was that I couldn't find the appropriate documentation, but now seems that I have found some good books... reading them carefully now ;)

...

maybe I should leave this for a better times?

Well, you learning curve just got a bit steeper... ;) You might as well add 'man bash' to your RTFM list. But there are some shell-scripting tutorials on the net. However I can't recommend any, because I don't know any. ;)

Here's a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash (I like Wikipedia more and more...). There are some links at the bottom that might interest you. Well, hope will be able to get to that curves' extremum (if there is one) :)

Thank you for the link...helped much Regards, -- Sergey Mkrtchyan Scientific Researcher Department of Molecular Physics, Faculty of Physics, Yerevan State University Tel: (374-10) 55-43-41 Fax: (374-10) 57-76-89

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Saturday 2006-05-20 at 13:56 -0500, Greg Wallace wrote:

Carlos: I haven't done any work on setting up new procedures in the rc system in a while, not since the dependency checking aspect was put in. I just took a look at .depend.start, which I take it is a file you have to edit in order to set up any dependencies between a new process and ones already existing.

Don't! Simply let "insserv" do it for you. Or chkconfig, or Yast. See "man insserv" for info on those files.

It looks pretty straightforward except for the "TARGETS =" statement in the beginning. Would you have to modify this as well as adding any dependencies down further in the script? I didn't see any explanation of what this statement was about in the README.

Correct, the readme is older. The documentation about this crucial aspect was missing in 9.3, when they introduced it. I don't know about 10.x. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFEb3cXtTMYHG2NR9URAp5/AJ42f6Btbr5LXBlSQgSJJky9G0CH0QCcCQVv ud1SjSAdclvMR+Sm8X9+Kks= =Xlrc -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On Sat, 2006-05-20 at 15:24 -0500, Greg Wallace wrote:

On Saturday, May 20, 2006 @ 3:08 PM, Carlos Robinson wrote:

Thanks for the info. Carlos. So, if I wanted to set up a new startup procedure, would this be the steps?

1) Create an init.d script based on skeleton 2) Run innserv against the script 3) Go to runlevel editor and enable the script

Greg Wallace

2 and three do the same thing. Another thing to pay attention to in the startup script are the: # Required-Start: $syslog $remote_fs # Should-Start: $time ypbind sendmail # Required-Stop: $syslog $remote_fs # Should-Stop: $time ypbind sendmail # Default-Start: 3 5 # Default-Stop: 0 1 2 6 lines as they determine the start order of the scripts, the S# and the K# assigned to the links in the RC#.d dirs. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Saturday 2006-05-20 at 15:38 -0500, Peter Van Lone wrote:

Basically, I guess innserv is called by chkconfig/runlevel editor ....

Yes. And it is far more confortable to use "chkconfig service on|off" than innserv whatever. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFEb54StTMYHG2NR9URAubdAKCB4ior3NPdDbIVaiF4wJNejHNbAwCfcW3g chCsMFkAtpvXaXDS9HkRUPc= =ZgL3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Sunday 2006-05-21 at 08:42 +0200, Per Jessen wrote:

...

Yes. And it is far more confortable to use "chkconfig service on|off" than innserv whatever.

Huh? More _comfortable_? How do you figure that Carlos?

Easier to remember, then, no switches: nimrodel:~ # chkconfig nfs nfs off Now I only need to add "on" to the command line to set it on: nimrodel:~ # chkconfig nfs on Also, "chkconfig" with no parameters lists all services (on,off,xinetd). And a few more things. But insserv does not have a check option. And you may have to specify the path. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFEcEdVtTMYHG2NR9URAuvbAJoDNFqa6Tpf/KOx6jBfVgQhTSIv0QCeOyX6 LuunH8h/FkwhDX0rakVXgOs= =BUQv -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 5/20/06, Greg Wallace wrote:

So, for example, does Default-Start 3 5 say to start it in runlevels 3 and 5?

yes, that -- when you have that in the init section, and then run chconfig/runlevel editor, it creates (via innserv I think) the K and S links to the script in the rc3.d and rc5.d directories.

And as far as predecessors, would you not set that up by adding a line into .depend.start (and .depend.stop for the kills)?

From what I have seen so far in the docs (I'm only partway through it all) it appears as though the .depend.start and .depend.stop files are modified automagically again, as a result of reading the init section "required start/stop and should start/stop" of all the scripts in /etc/init.d

Peter

On 5/20/06, Greg Wallace wrote:

In init.d scripts I looked at, Required-Start, Required-Stop, etc. are all commented, but maybe they are still read when you use the run level editor to set them up. Then again, maybe you leave them uncommented when you set up the script and then, when you add them via the run level editor, it comments them out as part of its setup process?

yes, that caused me concern, too ... but it is as you said. Chkconfig or the runlevel editor read them, despite that they *appear* to be commented. At least, that is how it has worked on the 2 services I have now setup for testing. Peter

On Saturday, May 20, 2006 @ 7:16 PM, Carlos Robinson wrote:

The Saturday 2006-05-20 at 18:31 -0500, Peter Van Lone wrote:

...

yes, that caused me concern, too ... but it is as you said. Chkconfig or the runlevel editor read them, despite that they *appear* to be commented. At least, that is how it has worked on the 2 services I have now setup for testing.

Don't worry. They are commented because, as the scripts are executables, those comments are ignored. But they are nevertheless interpreted by innserv.

You only need to use the correct format (the "begin init info" line till "end...".

The skeleton file has a lot of info.

- -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson

Ok, now it's making sense. So, you set up your new script using the skeleton and modify the appropriate lines in what appears as commented lines at the beginning of the script. Then, when you activate it in the runlevel editor, those lines get interpreted and the appropriate dependencies are set up at the same time it builds the K... and S... scipts. Do I have this right now? Greg Wallace

On Sat, 2006-05-20 at 18:31 -0500, Peter Van Lone wrote:

On 5/20/06, Greg Wallace wrote:

...

In init.d scripts I looked at, Required-Start, Required-Stop, etc. are all commented, but maybe they are still read when you use the run level editor to set them up. Then again, maybe you leave them uncommented when you set up the script and then, when you add them via the run level editor, it comments them out as part of its setup process?

yes, that caused me concern, too ... but it is as you said. Chkconfig or the runlevel editor read them, despite that they *appear* to be commented. At least, that is how it has worked on the 2 services I have now setup for testing.

Peter

That just happens to be the format of the file, the lines are read at config time anyway. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Saturday 2006-05-20 at 16:26 -0500, Greg Wallace wrote:

So, for example, does Default-Start 3 5 say to start it in runlevels 3 and 5? And as far as predecessors, would you not set that up by adding a line into .depend.start (and .depend.stop for the kills)?

Leave the handling of the "depend" files to insserv: they are not to be touched by human hands :-P - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFEb53EtTMYHG2NR9URAjLVAJsEA29ixkuUFZNoStcS5H8kWg21WwCfWzs2 Gj2s6JkJts7DRKf0BP1iiBs= =op4w -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----