> On 14 May 2018, at 16:33, chillfan@??? wrote:
>
> Afaik openrc is compatible with the init scripts used by all packages. Installing it and rebooting should be enough to start using openrc. It worked OK for me when I tested it.

Thanks. I just installed and rebooted. All seems to be running fine so far.

> On 15 May 2018, at 21:23, Martin Steigerwald <martin@???> wrote:
>
> I didn´t do anything except installing openrc and rebooting.


Yeah, I did the same, and got caught in the same non-reboot issue after running that command. It’s a bit deceptive to not mention the lack of reboot when it prints that vital information, especially if someone happens to run it on a remote machine.

> On 14 May 2018, at 18:51, Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:
>
> One property of OpenRC is it has no facility to respawn a daemon when
> the old daemon crashes. Some folks like it this way, some don't, but
> it's a fact of OpenRC. Except...
>
> There are two ways to have OpenRC respawn. Way 1 is to run the daemon
> from /etc/inittab, with the "respawn" flag. Remember, OpenRC doesn't
> have its own PID1, and traditionally uses sysvinit's PID1.
>
> Way 2 is to have OpenRC run either runit or s6 from /etc/inittab with
> "respawn", and then to put all respawnable daemons in runit or s6.
> Running either runit or s6 *as a supervisor rather than an init* is
> dead-bang easy. Since about 2010 I've been doing something similar: I
> ran daemontools on top of sysvinit, and it always worked out great for
> me.
>
> SteveT

Thanks as always for your insightful information Steve. Much appreciated. As someone who knows very little about init systems, can you explain what this respawning business is all about? I didn’t realise the existing sysv-rc did anything like that as I’ve never had one of the regular system daemons (or apache2, ntp, etc.) knowingly crash on me.

Apart from being a drop-in replacement for sysv-rc, is there any noticeable feature that I would use as a sysadmin with OpenRC? I’ve never encountered any boot issues or problems starting/stopping services with says-rc. Perhaps there are other features of init systems that people use regularly?

—Tom