14.6. Facility Names

Boot facilities are used to indicate dependencies in init scripts, as defined in a previous section. Facility names that begin with a dollar sign ('$') are system facility names, defined by the LSB, and SHALL be provided by distributions.

Note: The dollar sign does not indicate variable expansion as in many Linux utilities. Starting a facility name with a dollar sign is merely a way of dividing the namespace between the system and applications.

LSB applications shall not provide facilities that begin with a dollar sign. This document defines the following facility names:

$local_fsall local filesystems are mounted
$networklow level networking (ethernet card; may imply PCMCIA running)
$nameddaemons which may provide hostname resolution (if present) are running. For example, daemons to query DNS, NIS+, or LDAP.
$portmapdaemons providing SunRPC/ONCRPC portmapping service as defined in RFC 1833 (if present) are running
$remote_fsall remote filesystems are mounted. In some LSB run-time environments, filesystems such as /usr may be remote. Many applications that require $local_fs will probably require also require $remote_fs.
$syslogsystem logger is operational
$timethe 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 LSB applications. These facilities shall be named using the same conventions defined for naming init.d script names. Commonly, the facility provided by an LSB application init.d script will have the same name as the name assigned to the init.d script.