Suricata

How did you install Suricata?

I installed the package for Ubuntu 14.04 (Ubuntu Trusty) from this ppa https://launchpad.net/~oisf/+archive/ubuntu/suricata-beta/

Interesting - the init script is very similar to the one in Debian.
I will update once I do some more investigation.

Peter asked me on IRC what the behaviour was like on Fedora/CentOS, as he wasn't around when I was able to answer I thought I would provide the answer here.

The RPMs no longer install anything in /etc/init.d, but you can use systemctl state suricata. If Suricata is running, systemctl will return 0, if Suricata is not running, systemctl status will return 3.

You can also use "service status suricata", that just forwards the request to systemctl and returns the same as systemctl status.

Apparently this is not true for Ubuntu/Debian for a number of valid reasons (with the later actually dropped the LSB support as of July 2015)

Ref and background:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base#Limitations_on_Debian
https://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=208010

It seems Debian/Ubuntu have some deviations in the intention/rationale of the init script return codes.