> so sayeth Greg A. Woods <woods@kuma.web.net>:
>
> There's nothing magic about run levels.  They're just a way to extend
> the system's default run states from two to many.

More like "from two to a few".  If we want(?) to generalize BSD run levels,
why not allow for an arbitrary number?  I can see it now:

666:   run Satan at startup
1776:  play Yankee Doodle in background
90210: only allow logins from rich brats

> On an AT&T SysVr3/r4 box there are 6 states defined by default:
> 
> 	0: shutdown
> 	1: go to single user mode
> 	2: go to multi-user mode
> 	3: turn on networking
> 	4: un-defined
> 	5: go to firmware
> 	6: reboot

Why only 7 numbers?  (Of course, we can't forget "S", "a", "b", and "c".)
Why have both "1" and "S"?  Why not "R" instead of "6"?

Run levels are okay, but it's another of those "good idea, questionable
implementation" things.  I see no reason to copy the SVR[34] implementation.
Why not put all the system-defined levels at the beginning [0-x], and allow
[x+1-n] to be user defined?

I do think the various /etc/init.d/* scripts are a pretty good idea, though.
(Just don't go overboard like HP did with HP-UX 10.0 and put all the
environment variables in yet more separate scripts, all of which get sourced
for each script in /sbin/rcx.d.  *bleah*)
_______________________________________________________________________________
Steven Plite  <splite@wdni.com>       Open Systems Eng. & Support, Weyerhaeuser
    "This is the roller coaster of endless and violent vomit."	-- Jason Fox