Linux Administration Cookbook

Debian 7 and SysV init

Unlike CentOS 6, Debian 7 uses an older init system, its manual page lists it like so:

"init, telinit: process control initialization"

Again, we're dealing with PID 1 on the system—that much hasn't changed, only now processes are primarily controlled by the /etc/inittab file.

Runlevels are again a major player, though we use a different command to discover where we are (as a regular user, root still has access to the runlevel command, if you want to use it):

$ who -r         run-level 2  2018-08-26 19:54                   last=S

As with upstart, the actual destination of our service files is the /etc/init.d/ directory:

$ ls | grep sshssh

This means that, like Upstart, we can manually interact with our service scripts:

$ /etc/init.d/ssh status ...