From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Sep 26 00:35:57 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id AAA17133 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 26 Sep 1997 00:35:57 -0700 (PDT) Received: from word.smith.net.au (word.smith.net.au [202.0.75.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id AAA17127 for ; Fri, 26 Sep 1997 00:35:50 -0700 (PDT) Received: from word.smith.net.au (localhost.smith.net.au [127.0.0.1]) by word.smith.net.au (8.8.7/8.8.5) with ESMTP id RAA00370; Fri, 26 Sep 1997 17:03:25 +0930 (CST) Message-Id: <199709260733.RAA00370@word.smith.net.au> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.0zeta 7/24/97 To: Jaye Mathisen cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: rc.sysctl? In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 25 Sep 1997 22:17:53 MST." Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Fri, 26 Sep 1997 17:03:25 +0930 From: Mike Smith Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > Can anybody think of a good reason not to have something like > /etc/rc.sysctl that contains any sysctl -w's that you want to have run > before you start up a bunch of daemons? Yes. Nothing other than rc.conf should contain parameters (with the dubious exception of rc.local). > There doesn't seem to be any good place to put them. rc.conf is where the values should go. > rc.local is too late, since things like keepalive, send/recvspace, and > others may need to be set before things like sendmail start up. These are network parameters, and thus should be set in rc.network. They should be keyed off the existence of variables set in rc.conf, which could be supplied as NO by default. > Seems trivial to add, and potentially useful. > > (Of course, run levels ala solaris would solve this problem as well, but > that's another argument for another time and place). No, they further distribute and obfuscate the configuration information. You might want to consider a more generalised sysctl tweaking mechanism , eg. one that consumed variables of the form 'sysctl_X' where X was a monotonically increasing value starting with 0. You could handle these early on in rc, just after rc.conf is sourced. This would still suffer from the "sysctl is not in /sbin" problem for people using NFS for /usr. mike