"dcrespo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> Personally, I use init as an app monitor. It doesn't need monitoring > What's "init"? Sorry about my ignorance.
init is the first Unix process, and all other processes are descended from it. It is the alpha and the omega of Unix processes. Uh, wait a second - I'm having biblical flashes here. Let's try again: init is the first process started when a Unix system boots, and is hand crafted by the boot process. Every other process on the system is started by a fork (or a variant) system call, and are descendants of init. Part of it's job is starting the various server processes on the system that are appropriate for the system state. It notices when they exit, and restarts them. On timesharing systems, it will start a login process on every terminal, which would then exec it's way into a user shell, which would exit - which init would notice, and launch another login on that terminal. If init is dead, your Unix system is in a bad way. You can use this on modern Unix systems. You add an entry to init's config file (/etc/inittab on SysV-like systems, and /etc/ttys on BSD-derived systems), and init will launch a process for that entry. If the process ever exits, init will launch it again. For instance, I launch an ssh client to keep a couple of TCP tunnels open to my ISPs server so I can access services that aren't available from my current location. I run that via init. No need to worry about hardening the ssh client, or writing a wrapper around it, or anny such thing. init deals with all of that for me. <mike -- Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list