On Jul 6, 2004, at 12:11 AM, Sebastien ESTIENNE wrote:
To provide such a service, you should define:
1) the ability for a dependency to fail
Yes that's i was asking if this feature exist, it could be
implemented like this
depends on apache_bin can fail or a new keyword that would do the
same thing named "before"
Using dependencies to setup a start order is probably the wrong thing
to do. Marco is right about that dependencies in monit is a strong link
between two or more services. Setting a dependency between A and B in
monit means that A->B in effect is treated as a union (C).
2) a kind of ordering, or at least, the ability to not startup the
subsequent service in the list if the previous did not already
completed
to startup _without_ using a dependency
it could be implemented by keywords like before/after
Gentoo linux already provide this functionnality (look here:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?
part=2&chap=5#doc_chap4 )
you can define order with before after
dependencies need/use and also provide
for example you can say that qmail "provide mta" and "need net"
and that nagios "need mta"
so the system knows that he must start qmail before nagios (if you
had use the "use" keyword instead of "need" it means that qmail can
fail it's okà
"provide" is also because you can say that many service provide the
same functionnality, eg: mta -> qmail, postfix, exim
(1) Interesting idea. It sounds like something that monit could benefit
from. It means that we need to replace dependency in monit with the
keyword "need" and add the keyword "use" for start order and as a weak
dependency. (If I got this right?)
3) some tool to easily rearrange the services (a chkconfig-like
tool) 4)
the ability tu support different runlevels
I wrote this tool, it was easy, i just modified the default tool from
gentoo (it was just a matter of 5 lines)
Care to share the tool with the list?
you said that monit is only good in specialized situation, or when
customized, it's true, but you can define default and then allow the
user to provide custom settings without modifying the default
install, using include:
the default, would only check for pid, and listening port and then
the user can overide things or adding things by including his
configuration:
eg:
/etc/monit.d/system/SERVICE <- contain all default service config
and each SERVICE contain a line like this at the end: include
/etc/monit.d/user/SERVICE
so when a user want to customized apache for example, he just have to
create a file /etc/monit.d/user/apache
Very cool
I think that monit can remplace the default system, because the onlyt
things that the default init system has to do, is stating/stopping
system in the right order nothing more
and i don't see why monit couldn't do this?
for example djb's daemontools where built to manage services (they
manage qmail/djbdns) and monit seems to be a daemontools++. too bad
he also missed the ability to define services start order...
If we missed this it doesn't mean that it cannot be changed. I also
think that you can use monit with success as a replacement for sysinit
startup scripts, but means to set the start order is needed, (2) In
addition monit should have the ability to start a process without
depending on a pid file. (As stated in the first comment to monit here,
http://freshmeat.net/projects/monit/) I.e. monit needs to listen to the
SIGCHLD signal for processes it start, so if a child dies monit get a
signal and can restart the process. I haven't looked at the init nor
the daemontools code, but I'm pretty sure this is what those programs
do. The reason we don't do this already is that monit was (initially)
designed to monitor processes that was started outside of monit's
control. (To listen for SIGCHLD monit must start the process).
I think as a start we should add (1) and (2) to our TODO list. What do
the other commiters think?