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Managing Initscripts with Red Hat's chkconfig

Issue 84

From Issue #84
April 2001

Apr 01, 2001  By Jimmy Ball
 in
A simple but quite useful addition to your administration command vocabulary.
Conclusion

Hopefully, you've seen the benefits of Red Hat's chkconfig utility for managing initscripts. While its functionality seems simple, the timesaving benefits makes chkconfig an administrator's command worth committing to memory.

Jimmy Ball is an instructor with Batky-Howell, Inc. where he teaches UNIX, Perl and Java courses. He can be reached by e-mail at jb@batky-howell.com.

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Oracle shutdown not working

Thomas Gutzmann's picture
Submitted by Thomas Gutzmann (not verified) on Fri, 08/20/2010 - 03:29.

Hi,

thanks for this article.

One addition: Oracle doesn't shutdown automatically in RHEL5 if /var/lock/subsys/ isn't considered.

Please refer to .

Cheers,

Thomas

Oops... the most important

Thomas Gutzmann's picture
Submitted by Thomas Gutzmann (not verified) on Fri, 08/20/2010 - 03:34.

Oops... the most important information was truncated:

Refer to http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/RedHat/2008-12/msg00037.html:

Your script needs to touch a /var/lock/subsys/oracle file upon successful startup, and remove it on a successful stop. In a shutdown, services are stopped that have a lock file in /var/lock/subsys.

Here's what I've added to my script:

start)

echo -n $"Starting Oracle: "
/bin/su - oracle -c "dbstart \$ORACLE_HOME" &
/bin/su - oracle -c "opmnctl startall" &
/bin/su - oracle -c "emctl start dbconsole" &
/bin/su - oracle -c "export ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_HOME/oc4j; $ORACLE_HOME/bin/oc4j -start &"
touch /var/lock/subsys/oracle
exit 4
;;

stop)
echo -n $"Stopping Oracle: "
/bin/su - oracle -c "touch \$ORACLE_HOME\init_stop"
/bin/su - oracle -c "opmnctl shutdown" &
/bin/su - oracle -c "emctl stop dbconsole"
/bin/su - oracle -c "lsnrctl stop"
/bin/su - oracle -c "dbshut \$ORACLE_HOME"
rm /var/lock/subsys/oracle
exit 0
;;

Hope it's readable now, otherwise contact me at thomas.gutzmann@gutzmann.com.

superb

Sandeep's picture
Submitted by Sandeep (not verified) on Sat, 06/26/2010 - 10:45.

Super Article....
Helped a lot Jimmy.

Cheers!!!

-Sandeep

Precise

Sunil's picture
Submitted by Sunil (not verified) on Wed, 06/16/2010 - 10:34.

Perfect writeup. Very useful

Thank you

Mike Lerley's picture
Submitted by Mike Lerley (not verified) on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 11:36.

Thank you! Oldie but goodie. Have been wanting to decipher this for years.

Thanks

Sr Perez's picture
Submitted by Sr Perez (not verified) on Tue, 07/21/2009 - 11:32.

I found many references to "add these comments at the begining of the script", but no one seemed to have any idea what they meant. Your article gave me everything I needed to know.

Thanks.

very interesting and useful

marco66's picture
Submitted by marco66 (not verified) on Sat, 05/02/2009 - 09:46.

just want to thank for the article. I was googling for this topics, and when i found it I saved immediately a copy in my how-to-do

thanks
marco

excellent article

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 12/04/2008 - 12:15.

i just wanted to thank you for this great article !!

these line are magical:
#chkconfig: 2345 80 05
#description:

Managing Initscripts with Red Hat's chkconfig

Richard Armstrong-Finnerty's picture
Submitted by Richard Armstrong-Finnerty (not verified) on Wed, 03/07/2007 - 03:50.

This article was EXTREMELY useful! Thanks for writing it!

good job!!

Roll's picture
Submitted by Roll (not verified) on Sun, 04/01/2007 - 22:09.

neatly explained! but im a bit confused with the start and stop priority.. what are available values for those and how to choose the right one for my own script?

start priority

Andy Goldschmidt's picture
Submitted by Andy Goldschmidt (not verified) on Mon, 01/19/2009 - 06:58.

The priority is a number from 0 upwards.
It simply determines the order in which services start. Low numbers = start before high numbers.

e.g. you want your network to be up before start apache server.

S10network -> ../init.d/network
S85httpd -> ../init.d/httpd

The list above - network starts first.

At shutdown the reverse happens. stop httpd first before stopping network.
K90network -> ../init.d/network
K15httpd -> ../init.d/httpd

Service starts as daemon user

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 12/17/2009 - 14:30.

Excellent article. Once the service is started, it looks to be running as the daemon user. How would you start a service as a different user other than daemon? Thanks.

Most common way is by command line switch

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 04/08/2010 - 11:07.

Many daemons are started with a specific user & group by command line switches, for example you might see this one if you are running mySQL:

/usr/bin/mysqld_safe --user=mysql

Some have configuration files that specify the user/group, like for example sendmail.mc often has this in it:

define(`confDEF_USER_ID',``8:12'')

(Note the user "mail" has uidNumber eight, the group "mail" has gidNumber twelve on a typical Red Hat system)

Stuff that is run out of xinetd can use xinetd's inherent capability to manage users with appropriate configuration lines in /etc/xinetd.d - type "man xinetd.conf" on a typical Red Hat system and look at the user and group options.

Primitive daemons that don't have the ability to change their user or drop capabilities can still be run as a specific user with appropriate scripting in the init script; Red Hat supplies a tool for this in RHEL5 (/sbin/runuser) but in earlier versions you'll need to understand how to use and script the "su" command.

But it all boils down to this: the init script (for standalone daemons) or a file in the xinetd.d folder (for daemons invoked on the fly by the xinetd superdaemon) can control the user and group of a system daemon. If a daemon has a user/group option in its configuration file, you can use that, but the init script could override it.

HTH,
--Charlie

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