Init Script Status Support

This page tracks the currently informal and unofficial release goal to have all init scripts in Debian support the "status" action. Peter Eisentraut <petere@debian.org> is the initiator.

Purpose

Every init script shipped by a package in Debian (that is, a file in /etc/init.d/) should support the "status" action in an LSB-conforming and meaningful way. This information is useful for administrators and is frequently requested by users coming from other Linux distributions.

Principles

Vision

I would like to see tools developed (or brought into Debian, as other Linux distributions surely already have these) that give me a list of the status of all services, thus giving me a quick overview over what's happening with the services on the system.

Brainstorming

thoughts, ideas, questions ... add them here ...

Organizational

Statistics

Starting point approximately 22 April 2009:

(The latter two numbers are not terribly meanful except that they show that someone presumably did some editing on the init script in the last two years or so.)

Howto

An init script that already uses the LSB init functions and just starts exactly one daemon program can usually just do:

status)
    status_of_proc /usr/bin/foo foo && exit 0 || exit $?
    ;;

If you init script doesn't do anything after the case statement and doesn't have a gratuitous (and often wrong) "exit 0" at the end, then you can simply write

status)
    status_of_proc /usr/bin/foo foo
    ;;

status_of_proc requires a run-time dependencies on lsb-base (>= 3.2-13).

Next Actions

Obviously, we can't fix all 753 init scripts at once, so I decided to start with the init scripts for packages that I have installed on my machines. If you want to help, feel free to add the additional deficient init scripts that you have installed or otherwise care about to the table below. Eventually we should apply user tags.

Init script

Bug

Comments

anacron

bug

needs comaintainer?, also missing reload action

binfmt-support

bluetooth

bootlogd

checkfs.sh

checkroot.sh

console-screen.sh

cron

bug

fancontrol

bug

fuse

gpm

bug

needs comaintainer?

halt

hdparm

hobbit-client

bug (closed in unstable)

hostname.sh

hwclockfirst.sh

hwclock.sh

ifupdown

ifupdown-clean

keymap.sh

killprocs

kvm

lm-sensors

bug

lvm2

module-init-tools

mountall.sh

mountdevsubfs.sh

mountkernfs.sh

mountnfs.sh

mountoverflowtmp

mtab.sh

mysql

mysql-ndb

mysql-ndb-mgm

networking

pcmciautils

procps

rc.local

reboot

resolvconf

bug

rsync

sendsigs

single

smartmontools

bug

sysstat

tor

udev

umountfs

umountnfs.sh

umountroot

urandom

wpa-ifupdown