Linux – Identify if server boots using upstart or sysvinit

It's not directly about Debian vs Ubuntu, it's about SysVinit vs Upstart. Debian defaults to SysVinit; you can install Upstart, but you need to know what you're doing, and you should be familiar with it before you even think of installing it on a production server. Although it's theoretically possible to install both, with only one of them running as process number 1, Debian doesn't support this out the box.

Upstart is younger than SysVinit and has more capabilities, which explains why you can't just take an Upstart service description and feed it to SysVinit. You'll have to write a script for /etc/init.d. Basically that script needs to look at its first argument ($1) and start, stop or restart the service as directed.

If you were using Upstart events to determine when to start the script, you'll have to use some other methods. Upstart gathers events from many different sources; you can get the trigger from wherever Upstart gets it, Upstart in this respect is just a convenient way of not having to look for triggers in many different places and protocols.

Upstart will consider the job stopped if the main process (what is run if the script or exec stanzas are specified) exits. Upstart will then run the post-start process.

So what is happening is the first script is running and exiting, Upstart is considering the job stopped, then the second script is running and exiting. If you run the stop command on an already stopped job, it prints the message you saw.

To handle this, use a pre-start stanza:

pre-start exec foo --bar

post-start exec baz --foo

if you do this, Upstart will see the job as started once the pre-start stanza finishes, and not as stopped.