Hi guys,

I have a new Sarge 31 installation. I'm using it as a desktop so I am trying to run as few services as possible. I uninstalled netkit-inetd and ifupdown and I'm pretty sure that's why the network doesn't come up automagically (including rc.firewall not being invoked) on startup.

I looked at the init scripts but I can't understand what's going on. I know what commands I need to issue to bring up the network (I wrote short scripts for up and down, including firewall initialization) but I have to invoke them manually since I don't understand Debian's initialization process. Can anyone explain to me (or point me to a good read) how initialization works and flows? And/or can anyone tell me what I have to do to get the network to come up when the system comes up?

Also, I have a lot of messages coming from hotplug which seem to be spurious, but I don't see them in syslog! Where else could they be? I want to clean up the initialization.

Thanks,
Rand

Have a look at
You maybe have to add the keyword auto

For the log, maybe you can activate bootlogd in /etc/default/bootlogd

I don't have the man page.

I couldn't find anything in the Debian doc (I'm sure it's there, I just couldn't find it) so I looked over the startup stuff until I could figure out what's going on. I fixed the network startup by adding a symlink in the run level 2 directory pointing to my own network bringup command. It works better than the stock solution, because the firewall starts first. I don't know why they set it up so that they bring the network up and then invoke rc.firewall, but in my setup I do first things first.

Thanks for the info on bootlogd. I'll try it.

Thanks for the suggestion on bootlogd. It captured my messages. Now I'll search and post again if I can't figure it out.