Reindl Harald wrote on Fri, 20 Sep 2013 14:32:46 +0200: > /etc/rc.d/rc.local Thanks for all the answers. First, I omitted to explicitely state that these are web servers. There is no dhcp, only one or, in a few cases, a few IP static IP addresses. Mostly Centos 5. Changing the data is *not* the problem. As already said this will mostly be done by replacing config files (cp -a, not mv, this assures it can be done even more than once without a problem, replacement operations in files always ask for trouble if something non-standard happens, not to mention one has to code this - it's easier just to provide the correct new files), and by reading in a sql command that replaces an IP address in some tables. The big question is when and how to do this. rc.local seems to be a good place for reading in the sql command. But it doesn't seem to be a good place for all the other commands, especially the initial network setup. It's executed *after* all ini stuff is done, e.g. all daemons and network are started. Problem is that some network services may hang the whole machine for a minute or longer if they cannot establish networking (which would be the case with wrong data either for the ifcfg files or the config file of the daemon). At the moment I know of only one daemon which behaves this way (bigsister), but I may have forgotten about others. I don't want to wait until the timeout kicks in, the init continues and rc.local eventually issues a service network restart. So, I would rather do all the "replace file" operations before any of that init stuff gets done. Is this possible without much ado? Or should I rather do the "replace file" operations at shutdown (how, when?) and execute only the sql command from rc.local? Google suggests a file /etc/rc.shutdown (or rc.local.shutdown?) which, if I understand correctly, would be carried out after the init stuff for the shutdown (rc0) has been done. Kai