Re: runit not collecting zombies

[Alex Efros <powerman@powerman.asdfGroup.com>]

Hi!

On Sat, Jul 07, 2007 at 02:13:48PM -0400, Charlie Brady wrote:
> What happens if your cron line is:
> 
> */1  * * * *   chpst -L /var/www/soft.p/html/.lib/var/.lock.service 
> runsvdir /var/www/soft.p/html/.lib/var/service/
> 
> ?
 
According to crontab(1):

    No attempt will be made to issue commands lost due to a reboot, and
    commands are not reissued if the previously issued command is still
    running.

it may be enough to do even this:

*/1  * * * *	runsvdir /var/www/soft.p/html/.lib/var/service/

But. I don't know how reliable this feature in my cron daemon (I'm using
`dcron') and how it realized. And I know `chpst -L` is reliable and I know
how it works. So I'd prefer to use known reliable solution.
(Moreover, cron daemon can be any, not only dcron - I'd like to use same
crontab configuration line which will work with any cron daemon.)

Anyway, my code can be 'overkill' or ugly, but it working correctly and
it does nothing really 'wrong'. Yeah, it produce zombie, but that zombie
must be reaped by process N1.

> Why are you starting a new runsvdir every minute?
 
Because I need to restart user-controlled services under runsvdir after
reboot without any special configuration done by 'root'.

> What are you actually trying to achieve? - perhaps someone can suggest a 
> less "unusual" design.

Okay. I've a several independent web projects. These projects are complex
enough, and contain not only CGI scripts and database, but also cron
scripts, command line utilities, and network daemons. All these
applications should not require 'root' to setup and should be 100%
manageable by user. 

To have single point for managing log files for all these scripts I run
separate `socklog unix /custom/path` for each of these web projects, and
all scripts (CGI, cron, network daemons, etc.) in each project use that
'/custom/path' (different for each project, of course) UNIX socket for logging.

So, I need at least single 'service' for each web project: socklog.
Some projects also have other custom services like network daemons.
All these services should be running as reliable as usual system services
in /var/service/* and should be restarted after system reboot.

I solved this by using runsvdir to run services and using user's crontab
to start (and restart after system reboot or killing runsvdir) runsvdir.

To avoid multiple execution of runsvdir for same directory with services
I use `chpst -L`.

That's all.

-- 
			WBR, Alex.