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09/27/2004: "Linux for a dummy (Guess who?)"

I am typing this entry from my laptop, from which Windows is temporarily banished. Yes, I am running RedHat Linux 9 on my laptop, and although it's only been a couple of days, so far, so good. I will be learning a great deal about administering a Linux machine in the coming months, and I will share a little of that with you. This is the first instalment, regarding startup scripts. I'd never quite got this right before, but now that it really matters, it's important enough to me to get right.

I wanted to add popfile, the nice e-mail filter, to my machine as a startup service. Here is how I did it.

1. I found a good init.d script for popfile on the web here.
2. I copied the initialization script to my file system at /etc/init.d.
3. I made the script executable by the world. (chmod a+x popfile)
4. I ran the script and realized it had hardcoded /usr/local/popfile as the location on the file system of popfile, then fixed that setting.
5. I ran the script again to see it work.
6. I added two symbolic links, once at /etc/rc5.d and at /etc/rc3.d, that pointed to ../init.d/popfile. The links are named K80popfile and S80popfile: the former kills the program and the latter starts it.
7. I stumbled across the Services configuration tool in my desktop manager and ran it, which showed popfile as a service, and I checked it to make sure it executed at system startup. I made a note to remember that next time.
8. I restarted my laptop, which thankfully takes only about 30 seconds now.
9. I celebrated seeing popfile running on startup!

This might be old hat for some of you out there, but I never had the courage to depend this little on Windows before. I do now. I'll be looking for help and advice, too. As they say, thanks in advance for that.