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Restarting background services in Debian | Ubuntu

It appears that this step is increasingly finding it’s way into a lot of installation procedures in Debian | Ubuntu, so I decided to write a small post on it–that way, whenever I need to include a restart procedure on an installation, I’ll refer to this post.

Getting sysv-rc-conf

Sysv-rc-conf is a curses based interface to let you manage run-level symlinks, the ones found at /etc/rc. It’s a convenient way too to start and stop background applications. The run level manager may not be included during your installation of Debian, so you may have to pull it from the repos. You can do this by,

$ sudo apt-get install sysv-rc-conf
$ sudo sysv-rc-conf

You now should be able to stop a background process by pressing “-” (minus sign), then start it up by pressing “+” (the plus sign).

Restarting, stopping and starting from /etc/init.d/

There are a couple of symlinks you will find under /etc/init.d/, the catch here is that you have to know exactly what the symlink is, for the process you’d like to manage; so I’ll just give a couple of examples.

sudo ./etc/init.d/cupsd restart //restarts the print server cupsd
sudo ./etc/init.d/apache2 restart //restarts the apache2 webserver
sudo ./etc/init.d/networking //restarts the whole networking of your PC

Just substitute stop for “restart” in the above example if you’d like to stop the service. Obviously, substitute start if you’d like to start the service.

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