There have been a number of articles over the past year or two on the boot-up
sequence used by redhat-like systems, which includes Mandrake. Look in online
sites like www.linuxjournal.com, www.linuxgazette.com, etc. Also see Linux
Journal and Linux Magazine back issues.
There are also some excellent HOWTO's on how systems boot, etc (a good one
was written by Eric Raymond I think) which give info on the bootstrap
process. I wish I could remember the links now, because I recently read an
excellent one that went from hardware power-up through to initialization
scripts. Search around on google and you will likely find it.
A good place to start on your system is to load at /etc/inittab, which is the
file that init uses to figure out what to do after it has done the basic
system initialiation stuff it needs to complete. Each line indicates a
service type, the runlevel that line applies to, and what is to be done. You
will see that a script called rc.sysinit is run at all runlevels, and this
does the stuff that needs to be done as the system boots; it calls out to a
number of other scripts.
Following that, a script called rc is run being passed as a parameter the
current runlevel (apparently there is no way to figure out the run level as a
shell variable, because there is one line for each runlevel in my inittab.
The rc script is the one that, using the runlevel, runs the kill and start
scripts for each runlevel located in /etc/rc.d/rcn.d where n is the runlevel.
That is how different services are selected for running at each level.
You can organize which scripts are run at each runlevel with the chkconfig
command (try man-ing it) or with graphics interfaces (I don't know their
names, I usually use chkconfig).
Note that /etc/init.d is a symlink to /etc/rc.d/init.d. Also, each script in
the directories /etc/rc.d/rcn.d for each runlevel is actually a symlink to
the appropriate scripts in /etc/rc.d/init.d. You will see this with the "ls
-l" comman which will show you the links.
On Sunday 11 March 2001 13:59, Collins Richey wrote:
> Some questions
>
> 1) Is there any documentation anywhere about the processes that Mandrake
> chooses to start via the init scripts - reason for being, sequencing,
> etc.?
>
> 2) What is the recommended procedure for shutting down the starting of
> some of the processes without permanently removing them in case I want
> them again later? On other distributions, there's usually an
> ONBOOT=YES/No in the scripts to do this.
>
> 3) on Beta 8.0 there appears to be a complete duplication of scripts in
> /etc/init.d and /etc/rc.d/init.d. Why?
