Maintain the default Runlevel on Ubuntu 12.04

After many years of little change in Linux we, as administrators, now have a few changes making their way into Enterprise Linux distributions. Upstart is a welcome change to the sys init scripts we have been used to over the last 20 years. However, as with all change, there is a little readjustment and we no longer have the /etc/inittab file in Ubuntu Server 12.04. If we need to set the default runlevel then we now edit the /etc/init/rc-sysinit.conf where we can see the line :

env DEFAULT_RUNLEVEL=2

If we wanted to change the default runlevel to 3 then we would swap the 2 with a 3. Simple.