Peter Seebach wrote:
> I have to say, if someone's going to mention them, that the SVR4 run levels
> were a massive boon to me as a sysadmin.  It made it trivial to
> keep several different "system states" configured and available, and switch
> between them.

I don't like SysV init style though I must deal with it daily in work. 
You would need (services*states^2) scripts to implement state switching
correctly; SVR4 method is oversimplified (I got burned by SGI IRIX just
yesterday). If one of rc.d/* scripts hangs during shutdown, you are lost.

>  How do you switch to single-user on NetBSD?

kill -TERM 1

> I believe it's some kluge like 'kill init with a magic signal'.  I recall that
> it hung any system I tried it on (netbsd-current 68k, two different versions).

It works flawlessly on my 1.0/i386 .

> The SVR4 system strikes me as elegant and powerful, and seems to deal well
> with the question of how to do per-package initialization.

Per-package start/stop scripts are good idea. 
I support cgd's opinion: init.d/* = good, run levels = rubbish.

Zdenek Salvet
salvet@nyx.dcs.muni.cz