Questions[startup-scripts](server)

I had a daemon that needed its own dir in /var/run for its PID file with write permission granted to the daemon's user.

I found I could create this dir with these commands:

# mkdir /var/run/mydaemon

Then I could change its ownership to the user/group under which I wished to run the process:

# chown myuser:myuser /var/run/mydaemon

But this dir would be GONE whenever I issue a reboot! How do I get this dir to create every time the machine boots?

My runlevel 0 scripts in /etc/rc0.d, which should be executed when stopping are for example

1. K05foo -> ...
2. K10bar -> ...
3. K80baz -> ...
4. S10somemore -> ...
5. S90halt -> ...

Is it correct, that the excution order is as listed above, that is

1. First all Kills, in ascending priority order
2. Then all Starts, in ascending priority order
3. All this, independently of the runlevel to which we switch (S,0-6)
4. All scripts always get called (ie. there is no additional checks which would prevent a script to be called, for example whether in the previous runlevel that script was in fact started)

I'm confused because on my embedded system some of the scripts don't seem to get executed, and that page says

S20 link is started before a S91 and and K91 is kill before K20.

which contradicts my text above.

I want to pass some parameters as part of my ssh connection that I can use to set custom variables for my login to do certain things or run certain scripts. How do you do this running Putty on Windows machine, connecting via SSH to a CentOS machine?

In my linux startup scripts, when I start a process like (openvpn used for this example, but the question is general to any process);

openvpn --config /etc/myserver.conf

what is the best way to find it and be 100% certain it's the right process and kill it in the stop section? I normally use stuff like:

pid=$(ps -efww | grep -v grep | grep openvpn | grep /etc/myserver.conf | awk '{print $2}')

Sure it works nearly all of the time, but sometimes there are issues with accidentally matching processes with nearly the same name (e.g. myserver.conf-new), so I'm looking for a better approach.

• Some processes have a way to store the pid somewhere, that's fine, but generally I'm skeptical of killing processes solely based on a pid sitting in a file somewhere.
• Solaris has projects, it's not all roses in my limited experience because you have to set up /etc/projects first, but it does make it easy to tag and later find processes.
• Maybe using the environment, like setting an environment variable like (MYID=myserver) and then looking for it with ps e -ef | grep MYID=myserver? Still may suffer the same problem with accidental matching.

I wish there were something easy like:

launch --tag myserver openvpn --config /etc/myserver.conf

and

pgrep --tag myserver

I'm trying to get Xvfb to run when the system starts up on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick), but it's not working. In /etc/rc.local, I have the following:

/root/start_xvfb.sh >> /var/log/start_xvfb.log 2>&1
exit 0

And in /root/start_xvfb.sh I have:

#!/bin/sh -e
startx -- `which Xvfb` :0 -screen 0 1024x768x24 &
exit 0

After rebooting the machine, the log file (/var/log/start_xvfb.log) contains:

[dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic, removing from list!
^M
waiting for X server to shut down
^M

Given that content in the log file, it seems like the call to "startx -- `which Xvfb` :0 -screen 0 1024x768x24" is being made, but the process is killed soon thereafter.

I want to start Xvfb on boot because I need to run Firefox on a remote server that doesn't have a monitor display. If I run /etc/rc.local after SSH'ing to the remote machine, Xvfb starts without a problem and I can launch Firefox via "firefox --display=:0 &". If I try to run Firefox using that command without first starting Xvfb, I get the message "Error: cannot open display: :0".

Note that I am not trying to actually see the display on my local workstation. I want the application to display on the remote machine's (virtual, in memory) display.

Any ideas why X server is shutting down on the remote machine immediately after it starts? Is there a better way to have Xvfb start upon system boot?

Thanks in advance for any help.