Re: [WBEL-users] No chkconfig or ifconfig commands?

Terry Henderson wrote:
> On 7/1/06, Johnny Hughes <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Fri, 2006-06-30 at 17:59 -0500, Jeffery Mathis wrote:
>> > I am trying to configure a DNS server using WBEL, but when I run the
>> > chkconfig or ifconfig commands, I get "command not found".  I'm new to
>> > WBEL, but I do have prior experience with Red Hat and CentOS.  What is
>> > going on here?  Does WBEL use different commands or something?

>> Maybe you did not login with root in a way that gives you full
>> environment variables.

>> Normally, administration is done as the root user and not another user,
>> and you can get to be root in a couple ways.

>> The most common is to open a terminal and use the su (switch users)
>> command.  When using "su", you need to use a "-" with the command to get
>> all the user's environment variables (including the PATH):

>> so to become "root" with all variables set ....

>> su -

>> OR

>> su - root

>> If you use su by itself without the the "-" {ie, "su" or "su root"} you
>> will have root privileges but will stay in your current directory and
>> not have all environment variables (like root's PATH).

> Another sonetimes handy option:
> "su -m" affords full environment variables, (like root's PATH), but
> will leave you in current directory.


The trick is to know just what those switches do.

su without a switch (just the name of the user being switched to, 
defaults to root if not specified) does *nothing* but change the 
effective user ID and create a new shell session, I'm guessing with
the same shell the user was using before.

su with the -m switch (see above about user name) preserves the 
*PREVIOUS* environment you had - and is actually the default action, 
normally.

su with just a dash (see above about user name) starts up a login 
session for that user, so .profile, .bashrc, .bash_profile, etc. all get 
run [assuming bash is the root user's shell].  I believe that if root 
has a different shell as its default login shell, say ash or busybox, 
then that is what shell would come up.

This stuff can be tricky, and it's got a lot of years of bullshit crap 
piled up as cruft, so you have to watch out.  A lot of documentation out 
there tells you to add parameters to the X command in the startx script 
on your system - but startx hasn't *BEEN* a script in quite some time now.