Re: Some ideas...

[Jan-Henrik Haukeland]

On Nov 24, 2004, at 10:40 AM, Christian Hopp wrote:

> * We should intergrate the debian package building patches into the
>   monit tree.  First of all its easier for Debian users to use new
>   monit releases.  And it might make it easier for the package
>   maintainer to make new packages.

+1 But who will do it :)

> * This one might sound a bit esoteric but it might be useful.  The
>   syntax for "check process" only supports pidfiles right now.  Mostly
>   it is enough but some braindead daemon dont write pid files and some
>   rc scripts are not writing them in some distros.  Well one could
>   modify the rc script but it is being overwritten or changed when you
>   install a new version of that package.  Well now the esoteric part.
>   What about extending the "check process" syntax as followed:
>
>     CHECK PROCESS name [PIDFILE file|PGREP options regex]
>  *

It looks like an interesting idea but it also has a certain hacking 
flavor and gives me flashback to my first monit script 20 years ago :-) 
i.e. "if [`ps -aux|egrep $name |wc -l` -gt 1 ] ; then .. else ..; fi"  
But since we can use our C code to scan /proc or  similar on BSD, it's 
not too bad. However my ideal solution for an alternative to pidfiles, 
which I also have mentioned before, is that monit actually start the 
process it should monitor and use e.g. signals to watch child processes 
status and restart them as needed. Much like init(8) does today. This 
solution is probably much harder to implement but IMHO has a cleaner 
design. Just my $0.002.  If I should vote for your suggestion I think 
it would be [-]0. I can absolutely see how it may be useful and I don't 
have any good arguments against it other than my stomach feeling which 
anyway often is proved to be wrong :-)

> * Has someone already tried the allow network patch I have posted some
>   weeks ago. Well it's a security critical part, so I won't sync it
>   unless it tested and read through by a couple of people.

Ooops, I don't think I got that one? I was switching between machines 
some time ago and think I missed that. Could you please resend the 
patch to our common mail-address, monitgroup at tildeslash.com.

> So long folks... I gotta go on working,

Do you work on your Ph.D.? I seem to remember you mentioned it before 
or am I wrong?
--
Jan-Henrik Haukeland