Viraj's Weblog

I've been testing a few things on Debian that require additional daemons to be started (ldap, apache, samba, exim). I left them on and my bootup was getting kinda slow. So began my quest to understand the Debian initscripts.

Generally they are the same as Red Hat, with /etc/rcN.d/ directories corresponding to the runlevels. Now what I wanted to do was disable the inetd service from starting. On Red Hat, I would do something like:

chkconfig --level 2345 inetd off

How to do it in Debian? After a bit of searching on Google, I came across some recommendations to do:

update-rc.d -f inetd remove

Which actually works, but you lose the original startup order. Let's say inetd used 33 (i.e. S33inetd), the 33 appears not to be stored anywhere. On Red Hat, this was stored in the rc script itself for chkconfig. The only way I could restore this information is re-installing the package, which is kinda lame. Worse, if ever the inetd package is updated, the initscripts would be recreated! This is just retarded and I was beginning to see that update-rc.d should not be used for administration.

I did some more research and it turns out the remove method of update-rc.d is not recommended for what I'm trying to do. In fact, the Debian Security HOWTO cautions against it as well. That text and some users recommend that the /etc/rcN.d/S??service script be removed. Ok I can do that, but how does that remember the startup order? I still have to resort to re-installing the package to get it in the original state.

Ugh, I hate when only half of my question is answered. Yes, Debian truly is an elitist distro.