Lab 3 - Boot and Startup processes

Objectives

After completing this lab, you will be able to

- manually control some startup processes and services
- automatically control services

Estimated time to complete this lab: 50 minutes


As an administrator you will often have need to set some defaults for all users on the system. This helps to ease the job of the administrator and it can also be used to help new users (or non-expert users) on a system. Customizing the user environment can also be used as a method of quickly disseminating information to all users about - policy changes, security warning etc.

The exercises in this lab will begin from the booting up process all the way down to the logging in of the user. These steps will examine and try to customize some of the boot-up processes. The steps are:

Summary Of Steps

1. The Hardware loads, reads and executes the boot sector
2. LILO or GRUB loads
3. Kernel unpacks and is executed
4. Kernel initializes hardware.
5. Kernel mounts root file system
6. Kernel executes /sbin/init as PID 1.
7. init executes all scripts for default run level.
8. init spawns getty programs on each terminal.
9. getty prompts for login.
10. getty executes /bin/login to authentic user.
11.login starts shell.


The exercises will finally customize the user environment after logging in.

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