What is the equivalent for "service servicename start" that Fedora/RHEL/CentOS uses for Debian/Ubuntu?

What is the equivalent for "service servicename start" that Fedora/RHEL/CentOS uses for Debian/Ubuntu?
I've just read on some question here on serverfoault that using /etc/init.d/service is obsolete, so what's the correct way on Debian?

Solution 1:

I don't know about the "correct" way, but I always use invoke-rc.d, so e.g. to restart MySQL:

sudo invoke-rc.d mysql restart

Solution 2:

You can always just invoke the startup scripts directly (e.g., /etc/init.d/foo restart). This works on RedHat variants as well, although the path is slightly different there (/etc/rc.d/init.d, although I believe /etc/init.d is a symlink to it as well).

Solution 3:

all most every distro has /etc/init.d/service ********** {start|restart|reload|stop}

Solution 4:

The same service <servicename> start works for me in Ubuntu 9.04. It is in the sysvinit-utils package.

Solution 5:

Using /etc/init.d/foo on RedHat can cause problem if selinux is activated because the script should not set up the context correctly. The service command always works on selinux enabled RHEL.