init problem with Intrepid

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 17:25 +0000, Chris Rees wrote:
> 2008/10/30 Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca>:
> 
> > Killall seems a little abrupt, but should be safe enough, but starting via
> > the /etc/init.d/ methods does a whole lot more than "sudo gdm".
> > --
> > derek
> >
> >
> 
> No Derek! killall is WRONG! You screw up init's knowledge of what's
> running properly and what's not. You could end up with two gdms
> running....

The init process does not have much knowledge of what is running, so
this is generally not an issue.  All the processes running on the system
are descendants of init.  init mostly handles process termination
cleanly and cleans up its children which have exited. It will also
restart processes when configured to do so in its configuration kept
in /etc/event.d.

Killing processes willy nilly (especially with the KILL signal) is not a
good idea, since an abrupt kill can leave pid files and other cruft
lying around the filesystem which can cause odd problems.

I have occasionally had to kill errant processes using brute force when
the stop script failed for some reason.  But I usually run the stop
script again, so any cleanup in the script will be taken care of before
restarting using the start script.
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
System/Network Architect
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005