chkconfig priorities

I recently had a problem on a CentOS-6 machine where my dhcp server did not start at boot because it was serving a virtual network interface which did not yet exist.

The best solution to this problem would be for the dhcp server to start up and wait for the network interface to come up. Many other network tools do this successfully so I don't know why dhcpd should be different. That problem is however too big for me to fix on my server so I need a more simple approach.

To solve this, I would like to adjust my dhcp server to start after the virtual network interface service. CentOS-6 uses the (old) RedHat style init scripts (with some LSB configuration too). RedHat like to proclaim that they use upstarts now but all the upstarts do is make a call to the /etc/rc.d/rc script, just like init used to do.

So, the problem is still based around the System V style scripts which have magic comments which define when to start & stop the scripts.

This is the relevant parts of the header for the dhcp server (/etc/rc.d/init.d/dhcpd):
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: dhcpd
# Default-Start:
# Default-Stop:
# Should-Start: portreserve
# Required-Start: $network
# Required-Stop:
# Short-Description: Start and stop the DHCP server
# Description: dhcpd provides the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
#              server.
### END INIT INFO
#
# The fields below are left around for legacy tools (will remove later).
#
# chkconfig: - 65 35

Despite the comments about being legacy, when installed using chkconfig, the priorities used are indeed Start 65, Kill 35. We can confirm this with a simple ls
ls /etc/rc.d/rc?.d/*dhcpd

The virtual network is also controlled by an init script with a more modest header (/etc/rc.d/init.d/vand):
# chkconfig: 2345 95 05
# description: Virtual Area Network Deamon

Not surprisingly, this will Start at 95 and Kill at 05.

The first idea I had was to modify the dhcpd init scrip directly. Unfortunately this script is not marked as config file (in the rpm) so when a new version comes out, my changes will be lost. I need something better than that.

It is not immediately obvious but chkconfig does have the ability to alter the priorities. This is called override (but not to be confused with the command line parameter --override).


I was unable to find and documentation on the override but I did work out that his minimal config file was all that was needed:


/etc/chkconfig.d/dhcp:
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Required-Start: vand
### END INIT INFO

When chkconfig reads the headers from the dhpcd init script, it will also read this file (because it has the same basename) and override the values from the init script.

All that is needed is to apply the settings with:
chkconfig dhcpd on

Some information about LSB init scripts can be found here http://refspecs.linuxbase.org/LSB_3.1.1/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/initscrcomconv.html

The final job is to make puppet aware of my changes. Perhaps in my next post.