Summary

We've covered a good bit of ground in this chapter, and even got to do some cool hands-on stuff. We looked at how to start, stop, restart, and reload services. We also looked at how to enable and disable services and looked at the symbolic links that get created when we enable a service. We wrapped things up by showing how to kill a service, and then how to mask a service. As a side benefit, we saw what some service parameters can do for us and how the maintainers of different Linux distros can set up services to behave differently on different distros.

But what if you don't like the way that a service is set up on the distro that you're using? No worries. We'll discuss that in the next chapter, when we talk about editing and creating service unit files. I'll see you there.