using redhat chkconfig for logical booleans

Wed Nov 7 13:12:26 PST 2007

On Wed, 7 Nov 2007, cerise at armory.com wrote:

> Hi David:
>
> I thought a long time ago about implementing a lightweight filesystem
> mounted at /etc for a similar idea.  The idea isn't necessarily a bad
> one, but I think you'll spend a great deal of time trying to hack
> every program's reading of an /etc config file into your scheme --
> that's eventually what prompted me to give up on it.

> On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 12:15:49PM -0800, David Alban wrote:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> Many of you may remember the irix implementation of chkconfig.
>> Basically, it managed a set of "features".  Each feature could be "on"
>> or "off".  The chkconfig command could add a feature to the set,
>> delete a feature from the set, display the current status (on vs. off)
>> of one, several, or all features in the set, and change the status of
>> features in the set.
>>
>> Many irix init.d scripts would check the state of a feature and act
>> accordingly.  But any other program could at any time, also query the
>> state of a feature.
>>
>> So you ended up with an implementation of a set of arbitrary logical
>> booleans.  The state of each of these booleans was kept in a file:
>>
>>   /etc/config/$FEATURE_NAME
>>
>> which contained, literally the word 'on' or the word 'off''.

You might want to check out the Solaris Service Management Framework. 
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/smf-quickstart.jsp is some 
official docmentation, which looks pretty good; 
http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/sysadmin/2006/04/13/using-solaris-smf.html 
seems to be a longer article that may be worth taking a look at, too, 
based on a quick skim.

OpenSolaris is Free Software, in case you haven't been carefully following 
Sun's openness strategies of late.

-- Asheesh.

--
Traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops, boy.
 		-- Han Solo