Comments on: How to control Ubuntu’s Services easily?

By: Pedro Bezunartea López

Pedro Bezunartea López — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 21:24:59 +0000

Thanks! Very useful. I was trying to use bum, but as you said, it’s not complete. sysv-rc-conf does the job beautifully.

Pedro.

By: chair slipcovers

chair slipcovers — Tue, 10 May 2011 20:39:05 +0000

Interesting stuff. Were did you obtained all the information from

By: Zee's Blog » Managing Services in Ubuntu

Zee's Blog » Managing Services in Ubuntu — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 08:50:15 +0000

[...] http://blog.ubuntu-tweak.com/2007/09/30/how-to-control-ubuntus-services-easily.html [...]

By: Bill

Bill — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:22:46 +0000

Check out WEBMIN http://www.webmin.com/.

I’ve used it for years to manage all my systems.

By: Kearon

Kearon — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:20:52 +0000

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: krazypenguin

krazypenguin — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:38:21 +0000

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: rduke15

rduke15 — Wed, 27 May 2009 08:11:59 +0000

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: Melva

Melva — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:27:25 +0000

Keep up the good work.

By: john

john — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:34:32 +0000

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: Fernando

Fernando — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 08:26:32 +0000

Thank you for the info!