How to control Ubuntu’s Services easily?
September 30th, 2007 | by TualatriX |
I try to find some applications in order to control Ubuntu’s services easily, but no one is satisfied to me.
Services of Ubuntu itself
The first application of services control is “System”->”Administrator”->”Services”:
Although it can control the main services(totaly 23 services), but the services and startup-scripts in my system’s number is 93(/etc/init.d/)! Among them there are 35 items in the runlevel-2(/etc/rc2.d).
How can I use “Services” to control a service such as Tor? I’ve no idea.
bootup-manager
bootup-manager(bum) is another tool for controlling system services.
It is better than “Services” , because it found the Tor, the Vboxnet and so on.
But it is also not complete.
rcconf
It seems that the bum is the GUI interface of rcconf. I found there are almost the same.
So…I think bum is better than rcconf, just because it’s GUI tool.
sysv-rc-conf
It is really a good tools! You can use it to control almost all services, and you can change the runlevel of them whatever you like.
But the problem is: it is based on the command line and text mode, has few help information. It’s hard to normal user and beginner. Isn’t it?
If it has more information of every service, I think it will be better.
At the end, I have a idea.If there is a GUI interface of the sysv-rc-conf with a lot information/help of every service, it may be fit for beginners.
Tags: bootup-manager, rcconf, services, sysv-rc-conf, ubuntu
10 Responses to “How to control Ubuntu’s Services easily?”
By Mr. Dreadsoft on Oct 1, 2007 | Reply
I’m writing a working PHP-GTK example on how to interact with sysv-rc-conf. You can see a screenshot here
http://img265.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshot1gx3.png
Right now it’s read-only
By Fernando on Dec 5, 2007 | Reply
Thank you for the info!
By john on Jun 12, 2008 | Reply
For the command line the standard command to control services on Ubuntu since, Ubuntu v6.10 (Edgy Eft) is
initctl
see
http://www.linux.com/articles/57213
for how to use it.
For background See
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue13
http://www.linux.com/feature/57213
If you install sysvinit it will install an alternative init daemon on your system system that has problems and has been abandon in favor of the upstart daemon by Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo and SUSE.
It is not just an interface.
If you are new to linux learn initctl and upstart. If you are acustom to the old sysvinit from what I understand it will coexist with upstart with no errors as long as you don’t create conflicting configurations using but you eventually will have to learn upstart and along with it initctl.
initctl is not so bad and works fine but it’s not well documented. The above article (first link) will fill the woeful gaps in the initctl man page!
By Melva on Oct 27, 2008 | Reply
Keep up the good work.
By rduke15 on May 27, 2009 | Reply
Please allow me to disagree with your view of sysv-rc-conf.
You feel it is is difficult for beginners.
However, I feel beginners are certain to quickly destroy their system if they start messing with init scripts and runlevels. The Services Settings GUI seems adequate for beginners.
sysv-rc-conf is for the machine’s administrator, and generally people who understand what they are doing there. In a home user setting, that would be the geek friend/nephew/whoever who gets called in case of trouble. That experienced user will have no trouble at all with the straightforward sysv-rc-conf. When in doubt, it is easy to go look at the init script itself to be sure of what it really does.
If novices are scared away from sysv-rc-conf, that is a Good Thing.
I do have one gripe with sysv-rc-conf: long init script file names are truncated. So it may not be clear which service is controlled.
For example, I have
courier-a$
courier-i$
courier-i$
courier-p$
courier-p$
That is the only improvement I would wish.
By krazypenguin on Jun 19, 2009 | Reply
If you disabled a needed service by accident, wouldn’t it be easier to recover with sysv-rc-conf. Just login and from command line enable the service and off you go.
By Kearon on Dec 22, 2009 | Reply
In Ubuntu 9.10 System | Administration | Services has been removed because Ubuntu have changed many services to use upstart and this program is incompatible with upstart.
For me, easiest way to stop/start a service is to type:
sudo service name start|stop
eg sudo service apache2 stop
Boot-Up Manager (available from Applications | Ubuntu Software Centre) seems to work for some services – I guess those not using upstart yet. You can use this to start / stop services and to change start on boot.
For services that use upstart, I believe you need to rename their startup script in /etc/init.d if you want to stop them starting on boot.
By Bill on Feb 4, 2010 | Reply
Check out WEBMIN http://www.webmin.com/.
I’ve used it for years to manage all my systems.