questionable feature- rcvar woes

[Clifton Royston]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 08:37:30PM +0100, Milan Obuch wrote:
...
> Agree - everything just fine.
> 
> > Everything looks fine, but when I disable powerd in rc.conf then problem
> > arise.
> >
> > 1) Disable powerd in rc.conf- comment it out.
> > # enable_powerd="YES"
> > 2) Stop powerd
> > # /etc/rc.d/powerd stop
> > ...silence- nothing in logs either.
> >
> 
> Stop for a moment - enable_powerd means actually 'enable action carried 
> by /etc/rc.d/powerd script', using this semantics actually explains all 
> details. Or you could treat it as a stack of a sort, reversing order to 2) 1) 
> just produces desired output.
> 
> > What? Not even a warning message and powerd is actually running- why I have
> > to reboot to disable it? I know that I can stop it by enabling it in
> > rc.conf but what the point? Same problem when I want to start some service
> > without appropriate line in rc.conf. I'd prefer to see somekind of warning
> > about misconfigured rc.conf or at least information about what's going on
> > in reality.
> >
> 
> I hope my explanation above suffices. I was hit by this too, but rc.d scripts 
> behavior is well designed and understandable. If, for some reason, you are 
> still hit with described behavior, there is a save rope - /etc/rc.d/powerd 
> forcestop will stop powerd even if there is no enable var in rc.conf.

  Agree, agree, agree.  This is just something that any up-to-date
admin should be aware of and in tune with.  Yes, it's a bit different
from how some-but-not-all start/stop scripts behaved in 4.x or older
systems, but it's a very sensible behavior and it makes the /etc/rc.d
and /usr/local/etc/rc.d scripts behave much more coherently and
consistently.

  There are two different ways to get it to DWIM - either get in the
habit of doing 2) then 1), or get in the habit of using forcestop. 
Given this, I don't see it as a problem.
  -- Clifton

-- 
    Clifton Royston  --  cliftonr at iandicomputing.com / cliftonr at lava.net
       President  - I and I Computing * http://www.iandicomputing.com/
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