Coredump

It’s been a long time since I did a source tar-ball install. But the production servers at work require that applications that are not part of the standard install base (from Kickstart/Jumpstart and VMWare images) should be compiled from source. It was a very refreshing experience.

So after going through the usual configure; make; make install invocation, it was time to make sure that the app is persistent at boot. I would have copied an init script from my *nix desktop, but good thing SLES had a baseline script in /etc/init.d/skeleton.

In a nutshell, the steps are:

1. Define the INIT INFO section, as per the LSB specs.
2. Fill in the variables.
3. Use /etc/rc.status and rc_* functions for sanity checks.
4. Create the basic start, stop and status functions.
5. Use YAST (System > System Services (Runlevel)) — or, if available, innserv — to enable the startup script.

Below is a script I wrote for Apache:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Author: Ian Dexter R. Marquez
#
# /etc/init.d/httpd
#
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: httpd
# Required-Start: $local_fs
# Required-Stop: $local_fs
# Default-Start: 3 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 2 6
# Description: Start the Apache httpd daemon
### END INIT INFO

HTTPD=/path/to/apache/2.2.4/bin/httpd
APACHECTL=/path/to/apache/2.2.4/bin/apachectl
PROG=httpd

test -x $HTTPD || exit 5
test -s /etc/rc.status && . /etc/rc.status && rc_reset

start() {
	echo -n "Starting $PROG: "
	$HTTPD -k start
	rc_status -v
}

stop() {
	echo -n "Stopping $PROG: "
	/sbin/killproc $HTTPD
	rc_status -v
}

status() {
	echo -n "Checking $PROG: pid "
	/sbin/pidofproc $HTTPD
	rc_status -v
}

case "$1" in 
  start)
	start
	;;
  stop)
	stop
	;;
  restart)
	stop
	start
	rc_status
	;;
  status)
	status
	;;
  try-restart|condrestart)
        if test "$1" = "condrestart"; then
                echo "${attn} Use try-restart ${done}(LSB)${attn} \\
                  rather than condrestart ${warn}(RH)${norm}"
        fi
        $0 status
        if test $? = 0; then
                $0 restart
        else
                rc_reset        # Not running is not a failure.
        fi
        # Remember status and be quiet
        rc_status
        ;;
  graceful|help|configtest|fullstatus)
	$APACHECTL $@
	rc_status 
	;;
  *)
	echo "Usage: $PROG \\
           {start|stop|restart|status|graceful|help|configtest|fullstatus}"
	exit 1
esac
rc_exit

References: