System services

The system services menu shows which services are currently enabled on your system. It is broken into two menus; the standard services, which are the services supplied with the system, and custom services, which are services that you supply. In both cases, they are shown as a menu with the enabled services checked.

This menu currently doesn't allow you to start or stop system services; any selections you make from this screen will not become active until the next time you restart the system.

## How system services work

System services live in /etc/rc.d/init.d and are called by the system rc script when you're starting and stopping the system. You pass them a single argument: start, to start the service; stop, to stop the service, or info, to ask the service to describe itself. If a script does not support the info argument, it will be assumed to be a supplemental service (like the filesystems service, which is called by any service that wants to talk to files on the system) and will not be shown on the services menu.

Custom services are ones that are either supplied with software packages or written by the system administrator. They live in /etc/rc.d/rc.m and are also called with start, stop, or info arguments. Unlike a system service, they don't need to support the info to show up on the custom services menu.