How can I determine which service run during bootup is responsible for a certain behaviour?

Question

On my Fedora 14 system, some strange bind mounts have appeared in the list of mounts. They appear on every bootup. I can unmount them with umount -l, but I would like to find which package is mounting them (so that I can report a bug if necessary).

How can I find out which service is causing these bind mounts to appear?

Answer 1

The only definitive way is to try them one by one. But there's a good chance that the bind mounts are triggered explicitly from one of the init scripts, so simply searching them is likely to provide the culprit. And of course you should check /etc/fstab first.

grep bind /etc/fstab
grep 'mount.*bind' /etc/rc*/*

(The location of init script may be different depending on the distribution and init implementation, e.g. /etc/init*/* or /etc/rc*.)

Answer 2

Boot into single-user mode by pressing 'a' at the grub menu, and then adding " single" to the command line and pressing ENTER.

Then go through and individually start the services on your usual runlevel (which defaults to runlevel 5). You can do this by executing in turn, with the argument start, each file starting with "S" in /etc/rc5.d (they should all be symbolic links), or /etc/rc3.d if runlevel 3 is your default runlevel, etc. After each one has started, type mount|grep bind to see which bind mounts, if any, exist at that point in time.