On Wed, Mar 15, 2000 at 01:48:33AM -0500, Laine Stump wrote:
> Along similar lines - some people say that they don't like having to
> edit rc.conf to prevent a particular subsystem from running at startup,
> and want to just remove the rc.d file to make it not run. Others say
> that removing the file is a pain, because then it's more difficult to
> turn it back on, and they would rather have rc.conf. Doesn't it work to
> just do a chmod -x of the file?  (This might require an extra tweak to
> rcorder to work really well; I'm not sure as I haven't looked at
> rcorder, and I don't claim to fully understand everything that's going
> on here yet anyway) (I still like having rc.conf there, although it is a
> bit of a pain during the install)

For this (and I'm really disapointed it's not done this way) I prefer to have
2 directories, says /etc/init.d (in which scripts lives) and /etc/rc.d (which
contains symlinks to /etc/init.d scripts). The rc system would look in
/etc/rc.d for things to start at boot up. You want to avoid starting this
on boot, just remove /etc/rc.d/foo. But you still have the original script,
so that you can easily add the symlink back, and you still can start the
program by hand if needed.
For example, on some machines I have NFS server set up (/etc/exports is here
and valid) but NFS is not started at boot, I do it only when needed
(which is exeptionnal) and stop it after. I would expect a rc.d based
system would allow me to just type /etc/xxx/nfsd start, but here
it's not possible: either the NFS server will start on boot or
'/etc/rc.d/nfsd start' will do nothing (on a side note I'd also have put
mound and nfsd in the same script). I think we're missing a functionality
here.

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
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