Michael Bevilacqua on Tue, 11 Mar 2003 07:28:04 -0500


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Re: [PLUG] "services" under Linux


On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 06:57:44AM -0800, Wayne Dawson wrote:
> What exactly is a service?

A service is also refered to as a daemon under unix. Daemons typically
run in user-land memory space, but can run as part of the kernel (system
core) if necessary. They are usually triggered at startup from scripts 
running in /etc/init.d/.

> I thought perhaps services are always processes that run whenever the
> system is running, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

If setup correctly that is the case. Running `setup` as root in RH
simply gives you the option to enable/disable the script to be run from
init.d. However, the script will not run until you initialize it
yourself by giving a command like:

/etc/init.d/foo start

> ...where to look to find out for sure what these various services do?

The man pages are a good place to start. Type `man daemonname` or
similar.

> And which ones I can turn off?

Well, that's entirely up to you. :-D


-- 
Regards,

Michael Bevilacqua

   ~
  . .
  /V\   Michael@Bevilacqua.us
 // \\
/(   )\
 ^`~'^

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