[Linux-disciples] Apachectl, SSL, and /etc/init.d/apache

[Stephen R Laniel]

Earlier, I mentioned that I had tried to sign into a machine
that was hanging on Apache, and Adam wrote:

On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 02:18:33PM -0400, Adam Rosi-Kessel wrote:
> Agreed. There really should be a general non-daemon specific mechanism
> that says "okay, spent enough time here, time to move on." Some of the
> alternative boot systems do background the various tasks, so that would
> be one way of getting around it. Another would be to prioritize the ssh
> server and networking before anything else--that way you could ssh and
> kill the errant apache-ssl task.

Well, I think I may have found the answer, which tells me
that Debian thought of this before I did.

The problem I was trying to solve was to make ifup print out
more information on startup. So I looked in
/etc/init.d/networking and found this:

        log_begin_msg "Configuring network interfaces..."
        if [ "$VERBOSE" != no ]; then
            ifup -a
        else
            ifup -a >/dev/null 2>&1
        fi

So then I wondered where 'VERBOSE' is defined. Turns out
it's in /etc/init.d/rcS:

#
#	Source defaults.
#
. /etc/default/rcS
export VERBOSE

It makes some kind of sense: put all the configuration
settings for the daemon system itself in a separate file.
Putting it under /etc makes sense, because that's where
config files go, and /etc/default is ordinarily the place
where you specify whether a program will run as a daemon.

In /etc/default/rcS, you'll see

# Set to no if you want to be able to login over telnet/rlogin
# before system startup is complete (as soon as inetd is started)
DELAYLOGIN=no

At least that's what it says on my Ubuntu laptop. Turns out
that it's set to 'yes' on the machine where my client had
the Apache problem. I think this solves the problem. It's a
fairly obscure solution, though, isn't it? No one on this
list chimed in that this is where we were supposed to look
for the answer, and we're all fairly astute people.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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