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From what I understand, the file /etc/init.d/boot.local is a perfectly legit place to sprinkle a few extra commands you would like to be run when SLES 11 starts up. However, when our organization recently upgraded to SP2, this file was completely overwritten on our boxes.

Were my initial assumptions wrong? According to documentation (and the comments in the file itself) this file should be OK. But I'm not about to be burned a second time.... so where should I place these commands instead?

Note that I wish for these commands to be run before rc services are start. Therefore the boot.local file was perfect for our needs.

Thanks!!

Alfred Fazio
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From my limited experience with SLES you put your local customizations in the right place.

That being said, you did the Wrong Thing when you upgraded without first backing up your local settings -- the fact that the update also did a Wrong Thing by trashing that file on you notwithstanding, if you want to avoid being burned make sure you don your asbestos undergarments (and back up your local customizations) before turning an upgrade process loose).

Service Packs (distribution upgrades, major release upgrades, etc.) are especially likely to break things on you, and deserve this level of extra caution...

voretaq7
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    This definitely calls for _backups_ and for extra bonus points, _configuration management_. In my environment, puppet would have restored such a file and I might never even have noticed there was a problem. – Michael Hampton Oct 22 '12 at 16:21
  • Very useful comment. Thank you. We have been looking into setting up Puppet in our organization, but it is taking longer than initially thought. We do have backups, but it took a while to notice that things were amiss. – Alfred Fazio Oct 22 '12 at 16:27
  • @AlfredFazio Well you're definitely a step ahead by having the backups (you can just restore the file) -- it's definitely not an ideal situation to be in, but at least you're not scrambling through notebooks trying to remember what goes in `boot.local` :-) – voretaq7 Oct 22 '12 at 16:31