Greywolf said:

>I have to agree with this statement, but I have to say that others have
>seen this coming -- that it's perceived as "easier" to add a local
>"temporary" hack to rc.local than to do it the right way and write/modify
>an rc.d script (the reason for the quotes is, I hope, obvious).

>I'm not altogether crazy about the third-party stuff still using startup
>scripts that don't handle a "stop" argument (or, in fact, an argument
>at all).  I've grown rather used to being able to say "/etc/rc.d/foo status"
>or even "/usr/local/etc/rc.d/foo stop"; there are still some things that
>I can't do this with (atalkd and samba (recent!) come to mind).

At the time that the rc.d startup method, rc.local was going to be left
outside of the scheme. That is, it was going to be sourced as the last
thing in /etc/rc. That way, one could have a place to start up daemons
that rely on the system being up completely in multiuser mode. However,
rc.local now seems to started in some random way since NetBSD 1.5.

Two of my webservers, www.rmkhome.com and a box that I use as a big brother
server, are both running 1.4.3. This is how I start up apache in rc.local:

# Start up the webserver
/usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl start &
echo -n ' httpd'

What could be easier?

If /etc/rc.local goes away, I'll just add ". /etc/rc.local" to the end of
/etc/rc. On www.rmkhome.com I'm starting up 8 or 9 daemons in rc.local.

When I set up a system I use the policy that stuff in /etc/rc.d is
the basic system stuff and shouldn't be messed with.

-- 
Rick Kelly  rmk@rmkhome.com  www.rmkhome.com