Enabling boot-start for Splunk on rhel 9 / rocky 9

I installed Splunk on a VM the other day and found that I could not enable boot-start. I've never had a problem doing this before and was obviously frustrated.

The error I was running into was:

> /sbin/chkconfig no such file or directory

The issue I discovered is, that chkconfig does not come pre-installed on rhel 9 / rocky 9.

So to fix this I attempted to manually install chkconfig:

> dnf install chkconfig -y

Once again, however, no luck, errors installing chkconfig:

> error unpacking rpm package chkconfig
> Error: Transaction failed

What's going on? The folder /etc/init.d already exists and this for some reason is stopping chkconfig installing.

So what's the solution?

Well first, because I already had a Splunk folder and some other items in my /etc/init.d folder, I copied these out to my home directory:

> cp -r /etc/init.d/* ~/

Then removed the init.d folder:

> rm -rf /etc/init.d

Once again attempted to reinstall chkconfig:

> dnf install chkconfig

This time successfully:

> Complete!

Then copied my folders back in (use a more specific command than below if you have a lot in your home directory):

> cp -r ~/ /etc/init.d

Then I was able to enable boot-start for Splunk successfully:

> ./opt/splunk/bin/splunk enable boot-start
> Init script installed at /etc/init.d/splunk.
> Init script is configured to run at boot.

And now all is happy and well!

Hopefully this should work for you on RetHat or any of its version 9 alternatives, such as Rocky or Alma.

Goodluck!