For many years now, we have become used to managing services with System V init scripts that date back many years. However, without the desire to improve and the dedicated meliorism of so many in the open source community, we would not move on and improve. In CentOS 6.5, we now see some services being managed from the configurations within the /etc/init directory. These services make use of Upstart. This may be short-lived, as the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 uses a similar service manager, systemd, which is likely to prevail over Upstart. That said, both Upstart and systemd are managed in a very similar way, so visiting Upstart here is not an issue.

Firstly, we can check to see that we are indeed using upstart using the following command:

# yum list upstart

The output from the preceding command should list the package as being installed. The service uses the /etc./init directory for its configuration and from here, we can see the services that...