Re: Complications with CFExecd as a child of init

[Russell Adams]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 07:22:33PM -0600, Wheeler, John wrote:
> 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. 

Urg. I'm having similar experiences. See my previous post on the
signal issues....

The deal is, I've been looking at tools to use on my servers to ensure
that processes stay running, ie: daemon-tools, Monit, and certain init
replacements. I was hoping cfengine could do it in addition to the
management.

> 
> 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. 

That might work, but still ought to have issues on upgrading. But then
its just like using another monitoring program to monitor cfengine.

Really, you ought to just run cron from init on a separate runlevel
like I was describing. ;]

> 
> 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 $$.

Thats was I was afraid of. Thanks for saving me the time repeating the
experiment.

It'd be great if cfexecd would allow a parameter to force it to kill
itself after x minutes. That and check for new config files on each run.

Any further ideas would be appreciated.

Russell