Chapter 5. Herding Cats – Taking Control of Processes

All too often, Linux administrators without the insight that you have, will leave services running as shipped after a Vanilla install of CentOS. We know how important it is to be able to justify each running process and service on systems that we manage, and in this chapter, you will gain the insight to manage this. While we are here, we will take a look at the new Upstart services that are replacing the System V scripts, which we have become so accustomed to. Here is a list of sections we will go through in this chapter:

• Managing services with Upstart: Investigate how to control services in CentOS 6.5 using Upstart and the /etc/init and /etc/event.d directories
• Creating your own Upstart script: Learn how to create custom startup script for Upstart to manage your own needs at system boot
• Managing processes: Gain practice with the p series of tools from the package procps to manage running processes: ps, pstree, pgrep, pmap...