LSB init scripts and NETWORKING=no && exit 0

[Thomas M Steenholdt]

Ville Skyttä wrote:
> On Sunday 08 July 2007, Steven Pritchard wrote:
>> On Sun, Jul 08, 2007 at 05:04:08PM +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:
>>> Actually, all of 1) silent exit and 2) the zero exit value and 3) the way
>>> "is networking up?" is checked seem questionable to me.  Anyone have
>>> ideas for better approaches to this?
>> Isn't that just supposed to be checking if networking is enabled at
>> all?  If that is "no", presumably we don't even have the loopback
>> interface up.
> 
> Hard to tell, but that's just one bit of the puzzle.  To elaborate on the 
> issues:
> 
> a) Why doesn't it output an error message saying that the service requires 
> networking but networking doesn't seem to be available?
> 
> b) Why is the exit status 0, indicating success?
> 
> c) Why is the check done before doing anything else instead of being done eg. 
> only in the start (and restart, reload and friends if they're not implemented 
> using start) action?  That and b) will result in eg. the status action 
> returning 0, indicating in LSB terms "program is running or service is OK" 
> which it most likely is not if it requires networking and networking isn't 
> up.
> 
> d) Why does it just read something from a config file instead of actually 
> checking whether networking is up?  Not sure if that check is necessary in 
> the first place - could just let the service fail.  Maybe it's used/useful 
> for optimization purposes and/or to provide a hook for a more descriptive 
> error message than what the failing service would output.
> 

It might be a good idea to start looking at a nice way to handle network 
service deps. This could easily be cleaned at the same time.

/Thomas