Re: Initdb fails... Again!

Jason,

Jason Tishler wrote:
> BTW, by "sysv start script" do you mean using the sysvinit package. If
> so, then how did you get around the following issues:
>
> http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2002-11/msg00669.html
> http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2002-11/msg00677.html
> http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2002-11/msg00838.html

Yeah, sysvinit and initscripts. I've been hoping something like that
would show up in cygwin for quite some time, so I've struggled a bit to
make it work.

First, sysvinit (I think) installed a bad inittab (without runlevel
support). Reinstall fixed this.

Second, su didn't work (I thought), so I started hacking together a
working su.

But then I noticed that su actually *does* work if a privileged enough
user with uid 0 (i.e. "root") runs it. So now I'm running /sbin/init as
a service as "root", after assigning all the necessary privileges to
"root" ("Run as part of the operating system", etc). You have to edit
/etc/passwd by hand to make sure root gets uid 0.

Third, you have to get some start scripts. In particular you have to
make sure that they create/delete a /var/lock/subsys/<service-name> file
when started/stopped. Check out how sshd and xinetd works.

To make all of this work, you may need to change a few file ownerships
to "root" from "SYSTEM" (mainly ssh files in /etc), and change a few
"user = SYSTEM" into "user = root" in xinetd's config files. That is a
bit of a hassle, but it's quite easy to locate troublespots when you can
"Run as" rxvt as root and just test the start scripts directly (as
opposed to running a service and pray that it works...).

But now it works (almost) perfectly, running apache, cron, sshd, xinetd,
ipc-daemon and postmaster. The only problem I've seen is that cron
restarts itself as SYSTEM, even when started as root, for some reason.

/dan

--
Dan Holmsand
IB
dan(at)eyebee(dot)com