RE: Complications with CFExecd as a child of init

[Wheeler, John]

I run cfexecd out of init as well. I was pretty displeased with how this
performed overall. I found that if a cfagent hung, or took to long for
some reason, that it would block another cfagent process from spawning
on its defined schedule. This gave me numerous headaches as I convinced
many here that cfengine could be a replacement for cron. 

Now I run two cfexecd on a given host. One from init that does nothing
but verify cron is running, and the other from cron. 

I don't like this solution, but I didn't have a better solution for
solving both time critical jobs, as well as availability of the
configuration agent.

I think I tried to have a cfagent task kill the cfexecd process to
restart it. If I remember correctly this was pretty nasty. Since cfexecd
is the parent and cfagent doesn't disconnect/detach from the parent it
would kill itself. Kinda like doing kill -9 $$.

-----Original Message-----
From: Russell Adams [mailto:RLAdams@Kelsey-Seybold.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 6:45 PM
To: help-cfengine@gnu.org
Subject: Complications with CFExecd as a child of init

I'm having issues with using cfexecd as a direct child of init, I
thought I'd share to get some feedback.

My systems boot into runlevel 3, and as a final step in their rc
files, telinit to runlevel 5.

CFExecd is defined for runlevel 5 only, to run and supervise the
system after all the user resources are available and running.

# CFEngine
cf:5:respawn:/var/cfengine/bin/cfexecd -g

The problems I've been experiencing are that when update.conf updates
itself or cfengine.conf remotely, cfexecd may still be hanging onto an
outdated copy of the file. I've had to kill cfexecd to fix this. I
believe this behavior was the cause of my signal issues with 2.0.8p1
as well.

Secondly, I can't update my cached copy of cfexecd in
/var/cfengine/bin, cfagent complains the file is busy because cfexecd
is running.

So, I've been considering having cfagent kill cfexecd every time it
runs to force it to regenerate and perhaps allow me to copy over
it. However I'm unclear as to whether that will kill the current
cfagent, and it seems so heavy handed...

Is anyone else using cfexecd as a child of init and have any input?

I don't use cron to run cfexecd because I want cfengine to monitor the
processes I require running on my system, and if cron dies, the
monitoring stops. Hence my desire to make cfexecd a respawning child
of init to ensure its always running.

Russell


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