When I moved over from Redhat to Debian I really missed chkconfig, a wonderful helper script that obviated the need to manually mess around with the symbolic links in the /etc/rc.* family tree.   Ah, but sysvconfig to the rescue.

As an example, while I have Apache installed on my laptop I prefer to run this service selectively on an as needed basis. I mean, I don’t necessary want to make a web server available on my laptop when sipping coffee at my local wifi spot.  While there are other options, like update-rc.d, sysvconfig is, IMHO, the easiest and most intuitive method to enable/disable local services.

svsvconfig is available in the Ubuntu repositories and installable via 'sudo apt-get install svsvconfig'. To use this oh so useful utility 'sudo svsvconfig' and you’ll be presented with four choices:

1. “Enable/Disable” (to edit which service to either start (enable) or stop (disable) when the system boots)
2. “Edit” (edits the run levels in which a selected service starts or stops)
3. “Restore”
4. “Quit”

Since I wanted to stop Apache from automatically starting in all run levels when the laptop booted, I selected “Enable/Disable”, arrowed down to the apache2 entry and pressed the space bar as a toggle ( [  ] means the service is disabled, [ * ] means that the service is enabled), then tabbed to ‘OK’.  To exit, I arrowed down to “Quit”.

Done. That’s all that was is necessary.

Quick note, navigation is accomplished with the arrow keys, tab, and enter. This is not a mouseable gui, just a pretty script. Happy sysadmining.