Linux Administration Cookbook

How it works...

We've covered three ways of checking whether a service is running. The first, and arguably most robust, is to see whether the init system believes the service is up.

Our systemctl command reported an active, running state and gave us a time that the service had started.

Next, we queried the system's process list to see whether we could find our server; this works well as it could be the case that a misconfigured service file starts your service, but isn't then aware of its state, hence believing it to be dead.

Lastly, we used telnet to try and connect to the port we thought the service might be running on; this is the least intelligent way to check whether a service is running locally, as it requires you to know specifics ...