heyo, a while back, i noticed that there seems to be some rather inconsistent behaviour wrt doing "/etc/init.d/foo reload". typically this results in a HUP or something similar sent to the daemon in question, causing it to reload configuration, but in some cases the init script's actions are identical to what would happen with the "restart" target. as a result, there is an interesting variety of results observed when the service in question is not running. sometimes reload will fail with a non-zero value (lsb-compliant packages, i believe), sometimes it will exit normally without performing any action (apache 1.x for example), and in other cases it will start the inactive service (apache 2.x, for example). so sayeth policy 9.3.2: restart stop and restart the service if it's already running, otherwise start the service reload cause the configuration of the service to be reloaded without actually stopping and restarting the service, force-reload cause the configuration to be reloaded if the service supports this, otherwise restart the service. The start, stop, restart, and force-reload options should be supported by all scripts in /etc/init.d, the reload option is optional. my take on this is that, while optional, the reload target must not stop and start a service if implemented in an init script. it would then logically follow that reload must not start a service which is not running. is my interpretation of this correct, or am i over-analyzing things? thanks, sean --
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature