20.6. Facility Names

Boot facilities are used to indicate dependencies in initialization scripts, as defined in Comment Conventions for Init Scripts. Facility names are assigned to scripts by the Provides: keyword. Facility names that begin with a dollar sign ('$') are reserved system facility names.

Note: Facility names are only recognized in the context of the init script comment block and are not available in the body of the init script. In particular, the use of the leading '$' character does not imply system facility names are subject to shell variable expansion, since they appear inside comments.

Conforming applications shall not provide facilities that begin with a dollar sign. Implementations shall provide the following facility names:

$local_fs 

all local file systems are mounted

$network 

basic networking support is available. Example: a server program could listen on a socket.

$named 

IP name-to-address translation, using the interfaces described in this specification, are available to the level the system normally provides them. Example: if a DNS query daemon normally provides this facility, then that daemon has been started.

$portmap 

daemons providing SunRPC/ONCRPC portmapping service as defined in RFC 1833: Binding Protocols for ONC RPC Version 2 (if present) are running.

$remote_fs 

all remote file systems are available. In some configurations, file systems such as /usr may be remote. Many applications that require $local_fs will probably also require $remote_fs.

$syslog 

system logger is operational.

$time 

the system time has been set, for example by using a network-based time program such as ntp or rdate, or via the hardware Real Time Clock.

Other (non-system) facilities may be defined by other conforming applications. These facilities shall be named using the same conventions defined for naming init scripts (see Script Names). Commonly, the facility provided by a conforming init script will have the same name as the name assigned to the init script.