Too Slow To Stop

Rick Stevens rstevens at internap.com
Wed Aug 8 00:32:05 UTC 2007


On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 17:22 -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 17:39 -0400, Mike - EMAIL IGNORED wrote:
> > On Tue, 07 Aug 2007 16:27:20 -0500, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> > [...]
> > 
> > > 
> > >        For example, random.init has these three lines:
> > >        # chkconfig: 2345 20 80
> > >        # description: Saves and restores system entropy pool for \
> > >        #              higher quality random number generation.
> > >        This says that the random script should be started in levels
> > >        2, 3, 4, and 5, that its start priority should be 20, and
> > >        that its stop priority should be 80. You should be able to
> > >        figure out what the description says; the \ causes the line
> > >        to be continued. The extra space in front of the line is
> > >        ignored.
> > > 
> > > Mikkel
> > [...]
> > 
> > Yes, but what about my original problem?  How can a process
> > tell when the system has begun to shut down down?
> > 
> > BTW, in looking around, I found:
> > 
> > [root at mbrc32]# runlevel
> > N 3
> > 
> > Now this surprises me; it was run from a KDE Shell Konsole.
> > While I start my system at level 3, I then type startx.
> > I thought that the GUI runs at level 5.  Am I wrong about
> > this?
> 
> Yes.  Well, sort of.  If you start the machine at run level 5, the
> inittab fires off X.  However, you can start X at any run level.  It
> may be that some of the stuff needed to support X aren't running at
> a lower level, on Fedora everything you need is running at level 3.
> Since your machine booted to run level 3, that's what it's running at.
> You ran X as an application.
> 
> For the most part, run levels are really advisory.  They allow you to
> group different things to different levels of functionality. 
> Historically, run level 1 was "maintenance" mode and only the minimum
> stuff needed to run was used...on some machines, only the root
> filesystem was even mounted.
> 
> Level 2 was "multiuser" mode--run level 1 with other _local_ filesystems
> mounted and multiple consoles.  Level 3 was "multiuser mode"--run level
> 2 with network enabled, inetd/xinetd started as well to allow telnet,
> rlogin, rsh and ftp access, and NFS shares mounted.  Level 4 was
> user-defined and level 5 was GUI.  Level 6 is a restart or reboot.

Sorry, I meant to say level 3 was "network, multiuser" mode.  My bad.
(gotta start proofreading before I hit SEND :-( )

> None of this stuff is necessarily cast in concrete.  You can play with
> the inittab and the stuff in the /etc/rc.d/rcX.d directories to your
> heart's content.  Just make sure you keep a virgin copy of everything
> you mess with in case you do something...uh...silly.  :-)
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> - Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer             rstevens at internap.com -
> - CDN Systems, Internap, Inc.                http://www.internap.com -
> -                                                                    -
> -                   To err is human, to moo bovine.                  -
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
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- Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer             rstevens at internap.com -
- CDN Systems, Internap, Inc.                http://www.internap.com -
-                                                                    -
-        Hard work has a future payoff. Laziness pays off now.       -
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