I'm still configuring my system (installed last week) and have given myself a problem. Because I couldn't figure out all the sysV stuff and I was in a hurry to disable services, I used chmod -x in /etc/init.d as per Slackware. I later uninstalled some services e.g. nfs-common. However, I still get the "permission denied" message for these services on boot-up. I've tried running update-rc.d but the messages remain. Any tips would be appreciated as I've run out of manpages to read!

You should be able to get rid of the "permission denied" messages if you run (as root) "update-rc.d -f service_name remove" for each service that prints the error message, replacing service_name with the name of the service you wish to remove. This should remove the symlinks that are checked during boot time.

The actual init scripts are all in /etc/init.d/.

Symlinks in /etc/rcS.d/ (that point to /etc/init.d/) are executed first during the system boot. After that the symlinks in /etc/rc#.d/ (where # is a runlevel number; runlevel 2 being the default in Debian) are executed.

Some people don't like this symlink system and they prefer to install the file-rc package (aptitude install file-rc) which removes all the symlink directories and creates one configuration file instead, /etc/runlevel.conf. Then you can configure services by simply editing this file with a text editor. Removing the file-rc package (aptitude remove file-rc) removes /etc/runlevel.conf and automatically rebuilds the symlink directories for all runlevels.

There is a GUI tool available for managing services (aptitude install bum) and also several ncurses based tools (like sysvconfig).

Nice one Dead Parrot. Not only did "update-rc.d -f service_name remove" do the job, but your explanation of symlinks has helped me to make some sense of the thing.

One more question if I may, I have read that if you remove all symlinks to a service they will be reinstated during a system upgrade. If this is so, does it mean I will have to repeat the above after an upgrade?

BTW, I'm not a big fan of GUI tools but I might be tempted try out file-rc.

Thanks again

Mikie

Instead of removing symlinks altogether, you can change the letter "S" in the beginning to "K". This tells init not to start the service and any program that might automatically re-create missing symlinks will see that the symlink already exists, so it won't touch it.