For a while now I’ve been wondering about what the correct way is to start boot time services such as the Synergy License Manager, xfServer and xfServerPlus on Linux systems. A few years ago I managed to “cobble something together” that seemed to work OK, but I had a suspicion that I only had part of the solution. For example, while I could make my services start at boot time, I’m not sure that they were getting stopped in a “graceful” way during system shutdown. I also wondered why my “services” didn’t show up in the graphical service management tools.

My cobbled together solution involved placing some appropriately coded scripts into the /etc/rc.d/init.d folder, then creating symbolic links to those files in the appropriate folders for the run levels that I wanted my services started in, for example /etc/rc.d/rc5.d.

This week, while working on a project on a Linux system, I decided to do some additional research and see if I couldn’t fill in the blanks and get things working properly.

My previous solution, as I mentioned, involved placing an appropriately coded script in the /etc/rc.d/init.d folder. Turns out that part of my previous solution was correct. For the purposes of demonstration, I’ll use the Synergy License Manager as an example; my script to start, stop, restart and determine the status of License Manager looked like this:

#

# synlm – Start and stop Synergy License Manager

#

. /home/synergy/931b/setsde

case "$1" in

start)

        echo -n "Starting Synergy License Manager"

synd

;;

stop)

echo -n "Stopping Synergy License Manager"

synd –q

;;

restart)

$0 stop

$0 start

;;

status)

if ps ax | grep -v grep | grep -v rsynd | grep synd > /dev/null

then

echo "License Manager is running (pid is `pidof synd`)"

else

echo "License Manager is NOT running"

        fi

;;

*)

echo $"Usage: synlm {start|stop|restart|status}"

exit 1

esac

exit 0

If you have ever done any work with UNIX shell scripts then this code should be pretty self explanatory. The script accepts a single parameter of start, stop, restart or status, and takes appropriate action. The script conforms to the requirements of the old UNIX System V init subsystem, and if placed in an appropriate location will be called by init as the system runlevel changes. As mentioned earlier, I had found that if I wanted the “service” to start, for example when the system went to runlevel5, I could create a symbolic link to the script in the /etc/rc.d/rc5.d folder, like this:

ln –s /etc/rc.d/init.d/synlm /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S98synlm

Init seems to process files in a run level folder alphabetically, and the existing scripts in the folder all seemed to start with S followed by a two digit number. So I chose the S98 prefix to ensure that License Manager would be started late in the system boot sequence.

This approach seemed to work pretty well, but it was kind of a pain having to create all those symbolic links … after all, on most UNIX and LINUX systems, run levels 2, 3, 4 and 5 are all multi-user states, and probably required License Manager to be started.

Then, almost by accident, I stumbled across a command called chkconfig. Apparently this command is used to register services (or more accurately init scripts) to be executed at various run levels. PERFECT … I thought! I tried it out:

# chkconfig –-level 2345 synlm on

service synlm does not support chkconfig

Oh! … back to Google… Turns out I was something really critical in my script, and believe it or not, what I was missing was a bunch of comments! After doing a little more research I added these lines towards the top of the script:

# chkconfig: 2345 98 20

# description: Synergy/DE License Manager

# processname: synd

Low and behold, this was the missing piece of the puzzle! Comments … you gotta love UNIX! So now all I have to do to start License Manager at boot time, and stop it at system shutdown is use the chkconfig command to “register” the service.

And there’s more … With License Manager registered as a proper service, you can also use the service command to manipulate it. For example, to manually stop the service you can use the command:

# service synlm stop

And of course you can also use similar commands to start, restart, or find the status of the service. Basically, whatever operations are supported by the init script that you provide.

Oh, by the way, because License Manager is now running as a proper service it also shows up in the graphical management tools, and can be manipulated by those tools … very cool!

Of course License Manager is just one of several Synergy services that you could use this same technique with. There’s also xfServer, xfServerPlus and the SQL OpenNet server.