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we know that runlevl of multi user mode is

N 5

but on our redhat 7.2 we get the following

runlevel

5 3

what is the meaning of this run-level ?

how to change this machine to multi user mode ( full permissions )

and when we do

who -r

we get

run-level 3                last=5

Note - we perform reboot/init 6 , but still we are in run-level 3

Jeff Schaller
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yael
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1 Answers1

3

what is the meaning of this run-level ?

It means that word has still not percolated everywhere, even after it being explicitly stated in the systemd manual for its runlevel command since 2010, that this concept is obsolete.

Forget about run levels.

Your operating system does not have run levels. As explained at length in https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/394238/5132 , they simply do not exist outwith a few compatibility shims. What you see from the systemd runlevel command is a fiction, constructed from the states of the actual systemd mechanisms, by its almost wholly undocumented systemd-update-utmp program.

(I took a slightly different approach in the nosh toolset. I documented the login-update-utmpx command. But it makes no effort to construct fictions and I also made the runlevel shim just print "N N" to drive home the point that there are no run levels. Upstart's choice of printing "unknown" turns out to break some badly written package installation/deinstallation scripts.)

Run levels have been obsolete since 1990, and your operating system finally caught up with that 10 years ago, in RedHat Enterprise Linux version 6 when it switched to Upstart (which also did not operate in terms of run levels, but provided a slightly more extensive compatibility shim than systemd does). It has been more than 5 years since version 7 where it switched from Upstart to a system whose manual pages explicitly documented this as obsolete.

Ironically, systemd's runlevel is not even telling you that your system has not come up in multi-user mode. So it is pointless and ill-founded to ask how to switch to multi-user mode, considering that multi-user.target is probably already active on your system. To determine that of course, you use systemctl status multi-user.target, and not the runlevel command at all.

Further reading

JdeBP
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