Adding our own Linux startup scripts

Do we need to start something when Linux system starts?
Its not a service.... But I need to run this command when system starts....

Yes here is a small part which astonished me as I have not learnt this for years and missed it when I need....

Let us take a sample case: We might need to start a SVN daemon on the system.
#svnserve -d /srv/repositories

We need to run the above command on every start-up autiomatically. So we don't need to start this daemon manually.

Simple way is add this along with other startup scripts. Find which runlevel the system runs normally.

[root@sf03 ~]# runlevel
N 3
[root@sf03 ~]#

Our server runs in run-level 3 so lets take that as an example.
The server runs on Fedora Linux 10

The startup scripts for run-level 3 resides in the directory /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/
The scripts for run-level 5 will be at /etc/rc.d/5.d/

The directory contains shell scripts that runs on the ascending order on by one.

The last script that runs is S99local

Which has the content similar to this.
[root@sf03 ~]# cat /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S99local
#!/bin/sh
#
# This script will be executed *after* all the other init scripts.
# You can put your own initialization stuff in here if you don't
# want to do the full Sys V style init stuff.

touch /var/lock/subsys/local
[root@sf03 ~]#

Use the vi editor and add the startup command we need to add to this.

Example:

[root@sf03 ~]# cat /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S99local
#!/bin/sh
#
# This script will be executed *after* all the other init scripts.
# You can put your own initialization stuff in here if you don't
# want to do the full Sys V style init stuff.

touch /var/lock/subsys/local

# Start SVN Server at startup

svnserve -d /srv/repositories

[root@sf03 ~]#

Restart the server and check the script.

Keep the php-pear up-to-date

PHP has evolved a lot and when we need add-on libraries, we opt for PEAR packages or PECL extentions to add more libraries that resolves our purpose.

Recently in one of our servers CEntOS 5.2, we were about to install phpUnits to run unit tests in it.

Unfortunately phpUnit was not installed on it.

The website gave the following options to install.

pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de

and

pear install phpunit/PHPUnit

But the installation failed........ Oops it was odd to understand why?

The real cause was the pear module has not been upgraded to latest version the the new standard packages were not installed with this.

It would be better to do

pear upgrade pear

before we start any pear installations. Keep the pear up-to-date to make it work with latest library packages.