Questions[startup](server)

I am considering moving from a VPS to EC2. EC2 is elastic and so is its pricing; I could boot my instance on demand, then let it shut down if it isn't active by the end of some hourly period.

How much time does that process take? Assume a micro instance booting from EBS. Assume Linux (probably Ubuntu); the 10 minute times mentioned for Windows leave me unimpressed. The transition could be ec2-run-instance (with its pending state) or ec2-start-instance. Feel free to mention the start up times of other clouds if you know them.

We've had some nasty time sync problems on our Windows Server 2008 R2 servers lately.

I traced this back to something very simple: the Windows Time Service was not started! The time can't possibly sync via NTP when the time service isn't running...

The Windows Time Service was set to start "automatically" in the services control panel, which I double and triple checked. I also checked the event logs and I didn't see any service failures or anything like that. In fact, it looked a heck of a lot like the Windows Time Service never started up automatically after the weekly Windows Updates were installed and the servers were rebooted. (this is set to happen every Saturday at 7 PM.)

The minute I started the Time Service, the time synced fine.

So, then, the question: why would a service set to start "Automatically" ... not be started automatically? That seems sort of crazy to me.

What are the correct permissions for /etc/init.d/ scripts and what chmod options sets them?

I have a service foo which currently starts at runlevel 3 and above. How can I stop it from doing so, without using update-rc.d foo stop 3 ., which (if I understand it correctly) would turn off the service at each runlevel change.

(ie., if I was at runlevel 1 and enabled foo, then when I changed to runlevel 3 it would be disabled, no?)

Running Debian GNU/Linux Lenny.

I have installed Apache 2 from source on my Linux box. apachectl -k start works just fine, but how do I get Apache to start at boot time?

This is on a Red Hat Linux distribution:

Linux <hostname> 2.6.9-55.ELsmp #1 SMP Fri Apr 20 17:03:35 EDT 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux