Recently, I responded to another admins complaint about NTPD taking forever on boot up in console only mode. I starting looking over the host and found that the configuration is nearly identical to RHEL5 which makes sense as ESX is loosely based on RHEL3. The standard config is that no S???ntpd exists in RC1 only the K???ntpd. In RC3 as expected there is S???ntpd. I then looked to see if there was a custom initscript and found none. So I then reviewed the ntpd script in init.d and found it nearly identical to that of a standard RHEL ntpd script. One thing though is that network also appears to start during console only mode. Lastly, I should note I looked at chkconfig and found that ntpd is by default set to on at levels 2345 and off for 016.
Well a little more research and digging I found that contrary to what one would think that console mode is actually not single user mode it's stilling bringing up runlevel 3. The weird thing is that networking is disabled somehow in console mode even though the init scripts clearly show it starting. I don't mind this even though it's weird. What does bother me is that ntpd is still trying to start which makes one wait several minutes for it to timeout. So the big question is how do we disable unwanted daemons in console only mode, so that real troubleshooting can begin when one has a problem?
