On Monday 04 November 2002 00:43, Russ wrote:

Seems when I restart the system (i.e. power cut, etc), my server applications don't appear to automatically start - I have to go into the directory structure, find the following files and ./xxx start:

/etc/init.d/init.d/CommuniGate /etc/software/init.d/webwasher

I gather that "init.d" is the "startup" directory, and SuSE runs everything in that directory during boot?

You're on the right track. /etc/init.d contains the startup/shuitdown scripts for various applications. you should also see various "rc<number>.d" directories, and as you surmised, rc3.d contains the startup scripts for runlevel 3. The confusing part about all of this (is/was) that some distributions placed the "rc#.d" directories "below" init.d, and others "beside" [at the same level as] init.d. Functionally it shouldn't matter, but it can confuse some installation scripts. That's what appears to have happened for "communigate" since I see you have init.d as a subdirectory of init.d!

Is this just a simple case that the install scripts for these two applications should have put the files mentioned into

/etc/init.d

instead of the place where they've been put?

I would think so.

Is this correct? Anything else I need to be looking at (like any files which control the order of application startup?)?

You almost answered yourself in asking your next question(s) -- within the rc.d directories you should see several files of the form Snn<name> and Knn<name> where "nn" is a two digit number. "by convention", the Snn's are start scripts, and Knn's are stop (kill) scripts. In actuallity, these are "symlinks" BACK to the corresponding file in init.d

There's the files "S80CommuniGate" and "S99webwasher" [...]

The two-digit number DOES have a purpose: it controls the order in which scripts are started. There is a master "startup" script that is given the runlevel you want to change to. This script reads the corresponding "rc#.d" directory and simply executes (in sorted filename order) everything beginning with an upper-case S When you boot your system (with a monitor attached) you should see some "chatter" as things are started up. Eventually you'll see a message like "switching to runlevel 3" followed by several lines of the form starting xyz [OK] starting pdq [OK] starting network services starting eth0 [OK] starting eth-pcmcia-0 [delayed] starting communigate [OK] starting webwasher [FAILED] login: (the above is simply an example -- I'm fairly sure you don't have pcmcia services or network adapters, but this is about the only one that comes up with something other than "OK" or "FAILED" -- just trying to be complete here :) ) Note in particular the last two I've listed here: communigate and webwasher -- because communigate has a startup-number of 80 and webwasher has 99, you'll likely see them JUST before the "login" prompt as I've shown here. If you DON'T see them,. it could mean a few things: 1) the startup user doesn't have the "permission" to run (execute) the startup scripts [difficult to do since the startup user is usually root...] 2) the "symlinks" don't point to the right places [noting you have init.d/init.d and etc/software/init.d, this is more likely...] 3) there is some sort of error in the scripts themselves (not likely since you say you CAN run these manually and they work) I suspect you will see them, but you will also see "[FAILED]" off to the right for these -- that is when you'll have to start digging into the startup process in depth to find out why they are failing to start (could be that these rely on other processes that are not being started) For further info, type the command man init.d at a shell prompt -- this should bring up the online help that explains what I just said in greater detail :)