[SLUG] If its not broken, dont (attempt to) fix it?

[Gavin Baker]

On Wed, 2002-10-30 at 11:02, Adams, Jamie wrote:

> Then everything went horribly wrong. Really horribly wrong.

(cue the deathmarch music)
 
> Debian had a lot of services running at bootup that I didn't think I needed,
> such as leafnode and wwwoffle and other such things that I have never heard
> of. So I thought I would have a crack at getting rid of some of them.

Leafnode is a small NNTP news server.
wwwoffle is a web proxy that can cache pages for viewing while offline.

I guess you selected the "server" task or similar at install time? 

> It used to be a fairly painless process in Mandrake, you could do it through
> the control center. In Redhat I used to use the ksysv utility, which worked
> fine. I plumped for ksysv, told it that I was using Debian and started to
> remove the ones I didn't want. It all looked okay, so I saved my changes and
> skipped past the warning that doing it all wrong could bugger up my system.

Well the easiest way to remove them is just "apt-get remove leafnode
wwwoffle". 

If you want to leave them installed but not have them start up at boot
time, you can just remove their /etc/rc*.d/ scripts or maybe change the
/etc/rc2.d/S*wwwoffle script to /etc/rc2.d/K*wwwoffle. (debian boots to
runlevel 2 by default). This is what the various GUI sysV init editor
thingies do.

debian comes with "update-rc.d" to make this easier, theres also a
little curses GUI for it called "rcconf". 

I don't know a simple way (other than ls /etc/rc*.d/) to get a quick
overview of whats started/stopped at which runlevel, so i made a little
perl script to do it (attached), chmod u+x it and run it, it will show
lines like:

       0 1 2 3 4 5 6
  acct - - + + + + -
apache - - + + + + -

The numbers being the runlevel's, '-' meaning "gets stopped" and '+'
meaning "gets started".

I've never used ksysv, but if it destroyed your init scripts without
saying "OK, im gonna destroy your init scripts now, are you sure?". Then
i would file a serious bug report against it!

> On bootup I noticed that there was a lot (loads) more information than usual
> scrolling past, most of it said something about forcing loads and tainting
> the kernel. It looked like this was something to do with the USB modules so
> I used the modconf utility and removed them from the kernel. I dont use any
> USB stuff anyway.

I can't really guess what "forcing loads" would mean, but perhaps an
init script that mounts your root filesystem read/write was deleted or
such?

If a kernel module isn't released under a GPL license, then it "taints"
the kernel. http://www.tux.org/lkml/#export-tainted has more. Did you
use some binary only kernel drivers?

Regards,
Gav

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: lsinit.pl
Type: text/x-perl
Size: 989 bytes
Desc: 
Url : http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/scarborough/attachments/20021030/834037d2/lsinit.bin