[clue-tech] Multiple system backups

[David L. Anselmi]

William wrote:
[...]
> I have a couple of systems with daemons that are not hooked by service 
> or chkconfig.  Before I pushed my first version of this backup script, 
> this problem was in the back of my mind.

chkconfig seems to rely on header comments in the init.d scripts.  So if 
you have a daemon that chkconfig doesn't handle the magic may be missing 
from its script.  I would guess that service(8) also has some 
configuration info somewhere and that adding a daemon to its control is 
easily done.

> When David listed my reliance on service as a weakness in
> portability, I saw opportunity to address my own concern with his at
> the same time.  As a result, the hooks I put into my script work with
> -- literally -- any command or call to another script.  To
> demonstrate (and to fix my own issue with the two daemons in that
> demo script), I wrote service-control -- which is probably more than
> most people would need to temporarily stop/start daemons for the 
> backup run, but it was another good exercise.  :)

The Debian package that contains service(8) is sysvconfig.  Its 
sysvconfig(8) seems similar to chkconfig but Debian doesn't seem to have 
a package that provides chkconfig.  No packages depend on sysvconfig so 
it is only installed if you specifically ask for it.  (Only 84 systems 
use it regularly: http://popcon.debian.org/source/by_inst.)

And even though chkconfig isn't packaged, it would be easy enough to 
install it from source (which might also be the case for service(8) on 
Solaris, IRIX, AIX, ...)  My comment wasn't so much to point out a 
weakness in portability as to point out an assumption you had made and 
that some dependency info is missing from your install instructions. 
(Leaving out a copyright and license statement might be considered a 
weakness).

That's not meant as a criticism--your script is an interesting 
discussion piece.  But if you really want people to consider using it 
you might look at how other, similar, GNU packages are put together.

Dave
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