From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed May 21 01:55:34 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id BAA28714 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 21 May 1997 01:55:34 -0700 (PDT) Received: from lassie.eunet.fi (lassie.eunet.fi [192.26.119.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id BAA28709 for ; Wed, 21 May 1997 01:55:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from marathon.tekla.fi by lassie.eunet.fi with SMTP id AA16316 (5.67a/IDA-1.5 for ); Wed, 21 May 1997 11:54:42 +0300 Received: from poveri.tekla.fi by marathon.tekla.fi (5.65/20-jun-90) id AA25746; Wed, 21 May 1997 11:54:40 +0300 From: sja@tekla.fi (Sakari Jalovaara) Received: by poveri.tekla.fi; (5.65v3.2/1.1.8.2/20Aug96-0557PM) id AA02911; Wed, 21 May 1997 11:54:40 +0300 Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 11:54:40 +0300 Message-Id: <9705210854.AA02911@poveri.tekla.fi> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: process monitoring tool (like SysV init)? Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk >> I was thinking of hacking up a small program that would read a configuration >> file and then spawn and monitor the health of several child processes based >> on the contents of the configuration file. > > spawnd. Someone recently offered this to the ports list. Please read > the mailing list archive, and adopt this for a port. Some Mach/BSD distributions also had something like this ("nanny" was it?) It struck me as a rather nice idea. No more "ps | grep sendmail ... kill ... sendmail -bd -q1h" - just do "nanny restart sendmail". One problem was that the super-daemon needs to know the pids of the controlled daemons. They would usually put themselves in the background, escaping nanny's tender care. All daemons would need command line flags that tell them not to fork. ++sja