Many distributions are using the `insserv` based dependency following at boot time. After a bit of searching, I found very little actual documentation on the subject. Here’s the process:
- Add override files to /etc/insserv/override/
- The files must contain ‘### BEGIN INIT INFO’ and ‘### END INIT INFO’, else insserv will ignore them.
- Some have indicated that you can override missing LSB fields with this method, however, it does require the Default-Start and Default-Start options even though you wouldn’t expect to need to override those.
- The name of the file in /etc/insserv/override must be equal to the name in /etc/init.d *not* the name it “Provides:”. In an ideal world, the name would be the same as provides—but in this case that isn’t always so.
For my purpose, I created overrides for all of my services in rc2.d with this script. Note that the overrides are just copies of the content from the /etc/init.d/ scripts:
cd /etc/rc2.d # This is one long line; $f is filename, $p is the Provides value. grep Provides * | cut -f1,3 -d: | tr -d : | while read f p; do perl -lne '$a++ if /BEGIN INIT INFO/; print if $a; $a-- if /END INIT INFO/' $f > /etc/insserv/overrides/$p;done
Note that the script writes the filename from the “Provides” field so you may need to change the filename if you have initscripts where /etc/init.d/script doesn’t match the Provides field. Notably, Debian Wheezy does not follow this for ssh. Provides is sshd, but the script is named ssh.
Next, I append sshd to the Require-Start line of all of my overrides:
cd /etc/insserv/overrides/ perl -i -lne 's/(Required-Start.*)$/$1 sshd/; print' *
This of course creates a cyclic dependency for ssh, so fix that one up by hand. Feel free to make any other boot-order preferences while you’re in the overrides directory. For this case, ssh was made dependent on netplug.
Finally, run `insserv` and double-check that it did what you expected:
# cat /etc/init.d/.depend.start TARGETS = rsyslog munin-node killprocs motd sysfsutils sudo netplug rsync ssh mysql openvpn ntp wd_keepalive apache2 bootlogs cron stop-readahead-fedora watchdog single rc.local rmnologin INTERACTIVE = netplug: rsyslog rsync: rsyslog ssh: rsyslog netplug mysql: rsyslog ssh ntp: rsyslog ssh [...snip...]
Viola! Now I can ssh to the host far earlier, and before services that can take a long time to start to troubleshoot in case of a problem. In my opinion, ssh should always run directly after the network starts.
-Eric