John, the following was intended for you and it was yanked-pasted into the wrong message sent ot Rick. Response below. > > My question du jour: what daemon controlling system do you use? > > I've been using daemontools for years, but don't like the timestamps or > the way > directories are part of the UI (for command invocation). It is also no > longer > maintained, though one point of view is that it doesn't need to be > maintained. > > Any preferences? Or systems to be avoided? I'm looking at runit - a > daemontools > replacement. But there's also systemd and a pile of others. > > John To the original question, I think there is nothing better than editing files by hand when it comes to configuring things. This is one of the powerful things about the unix (and Linux). Convenience, like using GUIs, comes at a price, and you are relying on somebody else's idea of convenience, robustness and more importantly security. Never take my advise, but it is to learn to do everything properly and from the command-line. Keep unix unix and thank me later. There are many books on the subject. Get one and start reading and keep it as a reference. If you want a quick start within the next few minutes, here is your freebie: http://tldp.org/LDP/sag/sag.pdf The kernel has received updates, and several more daemons and other system related components have been added to Linux, and many more so on the more bleeding edge distributions. So, expect that you will have to stay up-to-date and that it is a moving target. (I do remember the day that "shadow" passwords were added to prevent hashed ones from being visible to common users.)