Practical Linux

Using chkconfig

chkconfig is an automated init script-management tool. It acts as a sanity checker to make sure that the system will stop a service when leaving a run level.

chkconfig requires some additional comment lines in the actual init script to tell it in which run levels the service should be started, and when, relatively, the service should be started during the initialization of the run level. (init scripts are processed in a specific order to ensure that services dependent on others are started after the services they depend on.) These lines, taken from the httpd init script, are as follows:

# chkconfig: 345 85 15
# description: Apache is a World Wide Web server.  It is used to serve
# HTML files and CGI.

The first line, which is ...