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I am needing to see the status of some services on some of our RHEL 5.8 hosts on which I am not an admin. Much to my surprise, I am not able to get any info how to do it (such as chkconfig or systemctl on Fedora) from Google. Neither chkconfig nor systemctl are accessible to me, not sure if it is because of permissions or they are just not available on the system but there are no man pages for either.

Why is it that there is such a mysterious lack of service management documentation online for RHEL 5.8 and which commands can I use for simple service listings?

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Perhaps /usr/sbin is not available in your PATH. Now, you can check if it's there with 'which chkconfig'. And finally, are the manpages installed? – schaiba Feb 15 at 20:04
RHEL 5.8 is similar to Fedora 16 (probably way older, but that one hasn't fallen out of sight yet), the documentation for that one should be applicable. In any case, trawling around the configuration/status of services should be strictly off-limits to the unwashed masses anyway. – vonbrand Feb 15 at 20:11
There is no chkconfig in my /usr/sbin – amphibient Feb 15 at 20:13

closed as not a real question by jasonwryan, warl0ck, Caleb, rahmu, Renan Feb 16 at 21:36

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote

Your accusation of a lack of documentation for RHEL is extremely poorly founded; RHEL is one of the best and most comprehensively documented Linux distributions out there.

Information on chkconfig, for instance, is in chapter 18 of the Deployment Guide.

If you find that your installed system doesn't seem to have utilities or man pages that you expect to be there, contact your system administrator.

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google.com/… – amphibient Feb 15 at 22:03
as opposed to google.com/… which returns the fedora doc on top – amphibient Feb 15 at 22:07
So you're complaining and downvoting me because Google's search results suck? – Michael Hampton Feb 15 at 22:13
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Google are Ubuntu fans... That notwithstanding, the fact is that the RHEL documentation is all right there, and very well written, and covers pretty much everything. – Michael Hampton Feb 15 at 22:17
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If I want to go to the "RHEL Documentation", I'm going to go to the "RHEL Documentation". OK, I lie, I'll Google it. HOLY SHIT FIRST HIT IS access.redhat.com/knowledge/docs. Oh look! There's ALL THE RedHat DOCUMENTATION. – MikeyB Feb 15 at 22:42
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