[Users] Debian-style init scripts considered harmful?

Steve Wray steve.wray at cwa.co.nz
Thu Jul 10 21:23:48 EDT 2008


Hi there,

Debian uses start-stop-daemon in the init scripts to, for one thing, 
stop services.

 From the man page:

Note:  unless --pidfile is specified, start-stop-daemon behaves similar
to killall(1).  start-stop-daemon will scan the process  table  looking
for  any  processes  which  match the process name, uid, and/or gid (if
specified). Any matching process will prevent --start from starting the
daemon.  All  matching processes will be sent the KILL signal if --stop
is specified. For daemons which have long-lived children which need  to
live through a --stop you must specify a pidfile.

For example, nfs-kernel-server does not use --pidfile. It looks for nfsd 
processes to kill.

Suppose that the Openvz host and one of its guests were running NFS and, 
on the host, one were to run /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server stop

As I understand it this would have the side-effect of killing off the 
nfsd processes on the guest.

If true, this would seem somewhat... harsh?


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