A working "service" script in Ubuntu Intrepid

I managed hundreds of Red Hat, Fedora, and CentOS servers between 1998 and 2006. That's over 8 years of using the service command to start, stop, restart, and obtain the status of the many services located in /etc/init.d.

After my migration to Ubuntu, I would often find myself trying to use the service command at an Ubuntu command prompt.

With some digging, I might have found two different implementations in Ubuntu, trying to provide the service command's functionality, in the packages:

• sysvconfig
  
• debian-helper-scripts
  

However, neither of these implementations were very good or complete.

After taking an overnight flight to London, Rick Clark and I were on the Gatwick Express heading into Canonical's office in London. We decided that the Ubuntu Server would very much benefit from a clean implementation of the traditional Red Hat service command, installed by default.

And thus, /usr/bin/service is now provided by sysvinit-utils (2.86.ds1-59ubuntu4) in Intrepid. This provides a convenient wrapper for running things like:

• service apache2 restart

And it also provides a comprehensive mechanism for gathering the status of all services on the system:

• service --status-all
  

Which, at the moment, exposes how many init scripts we have that are lacking status actions. If you would like to help with that, please see:

• http://dustinkirkland.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/adding-a-status-action-to-init-scripts/
  

:-Dustin