On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 17:39 -0400, Mike - EMAIL IGNORED wrote: > On Tue, 07 Aug 2007 16:27:20 -0500, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: > [...] > > > > > For example, random.init has these three lines: > > # chkconfig: 2345 20 80 > > # description: Saves and restores system entropy pool for \ > > # higher quality random number generation. > > This says that the random script should be started in levels > > 2, 3, 4, and 5, that its start priority should be 20, and > > that its stop priority should be 80. You should be able to > > figure out what the description says; the \ causes the line > > to be continued. The extra space in front of the line is > > ignored. > > > > Mikkel > [...] > > Yes, but what about my original problem? How can a process > tell when the system has begun to shut down down? > > BTW, in looking around, I found: > > [root@mbrc32]# runlevel > N 3 > > Now this surprises me; it was run from a KDE Shell Konsole. > While I start my system at level 3, I then type startx. > I thought that the GUI runs at level 5. Am I wrong about > this? Yes. Well, sort of. If you start the machine at run level 5, the inittab fires off X. However, you can start X at any run level. It may be that some of the stuff needed to support X aren't running at a lower level, on Fedora everything you need is running at level 3. Since your machine booted to run level 3, that's what it's running at. You ran X as an application. For the most part, run levels are really advisory. They allow you to group different things to different levels of functionality. Historically, run level 1 was "maintenance" mode and only the minimum stuff needed to run was used...on some machines, only the root filesystem was even mounted. Level 2 was "multiuser" mode--run level 1 with other _local_ filesystems mounted and multiple consoles. Level 3 was "multiuser mode"--run level 2 with network enabled, inetd/xinetd started as well to allow telnet, rlogin, rsh and ftp access, and NFS shares mounted. Level 4 was user-defined and level 5 was GUI. Level 6 is a restart or reboot. None of this stuff is necessarily cast in concrete. You can play with the inittab and the stuff in the /etc/rc.d/rcX.d directories to your heart's content. Just make sure you keep a virgin copy of everything you mess with in case you do something...uh...silly. :-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer rstevens@xxxxxxxxxxxx - - CDN Systems, Internap, Inc. http://www.internap.com - - - - To err is human, to moo bovine. - ----------------------------------------------------------------------
