Puppet

Actually the provider does both: chkconfig —del service and chkconfig service off and the reverse when enabling.

Are there any other reasons why we shouldn’t use —add/—del? I don’t have any redhat boxen lying around to see what chkconfig —del servicename actually does.

I have the code for this (http://github.com/fujin/puppet/commits/fix1219), but I don’t understand enough about the redhat service provider as to how it currently works and what would break if we changed this. As such, I’m going to leave the ticket as needs more info.

Anyone care to offer some input?

“Actually the provider does both: chkconfig —del service and chkconfig service off and the reverse when enabling.”

But why? The only command that needs to run to enable/disable a service is ‘chkconfig servicename on/off’, so why also run ‘chkconfig —add/del servicename’? The latter commands are used when installing and uninstalling a service (such as by a package manager), and are not supposed to be used for simple enabling/disabling of a service.

Sent pull request to Luke

I’m hesitant to accept the patch without feedback from David. I’m emailed him to ask about it.

Yes, this is the right thing to do. chkonfig —add/—del should only be used by the RPM %post scripts to register a service for management with chkconfig.

I’d be interested in David’s view on this.

James Turnbull wrote:

I’d be interested in David’s view on this.

The original ticket is right: puppet should use ‘chkconfig service off’, not ‘chkconfig —del service’. If there are services that do not install themselves with ‘chkconfig —add service’ in a post script in the RPM, it should be filed as a bug against the package.

If puppet wants to be extra thorough, it should check that links have been set up by running ‘chkconfig —list service’, and if that produces an error, run ‘chkconfig —add’ again; this will be particularly important for systems that have been broken by puppet’s erroneous ‘chkconfig —del’

David Lutterkort wrote:

If puppet wants to be extra thorough, it should check that links have been set up by running ‘chkconfig —list service’, and if that produces an error, run ‘chkconfig —add’ again; this will be particularly important for systems that have been broken by puppet’s erroneous ‘chkconfig —del’

I would have suggested it if you hadn’t done so already. Earlier versions of Puppet has broken many services on our systems by using “chkconfig —del servicename”, and IIRC, trying to run “chkconfig servicename on/off” results in an error for such a service. It would be nice to include code that cleans up the breakage that the earlier version caused, so that the sysadmins won’t have to do that manually.