Re: [gentoo-dev] init script guidelines

[Francesco R]

Eric Brown wrote:

> Services that use Gentoo init scripts often report a status of [started] or
>
> [OK] even though they fail to start.  The most recent bug like this that I've
>
> found is with snort.  If you have a bad rule, snort will initialize, the
>
> rc-scripts will give it an [OK] status, and then it will die once it parses the
>
> rules.
>
>
>
> The real problem is not that the daemons don't return errors, but that our init
>
> scripts do not make reasonable attempts to verify service startup.  If a Gentoo
>
> init script claims that a service started, it should make an effort to check
>
> that the processes are actually running shortly after the script is run, even if
>
> start-stop-daemon says the parent process initialized.  Relying on the return
>
> value of start-stop-daemon is simply insufficient for some services.
>
>
>
> I am aware that there are services that can monitor the status of other services
>
> (app-admin/mon?) but I think this issue is a little different.  If an ebuild
>
> developer is aware of an error condition can commonly occur shortly after a
>
> daemon initializes, why not attempt to catch those errors?  Most of them could
>
> probably be caught by simply checking to see if the process is still running
>
> shortly after the script is run.
>
>
>
> I propose increasing developer awareness of this problem, perhaps through some
>
> formal guidelines for ebuild developers.  At the very least, I would like to see
>
> these bugs being acknowledged in bugs.gentoo.org instead of getting the same old
>
> upstream/it's not our fault response.  We are responsible for our init scripts,
>
> and they are important to our users.
>
>
>
> I have 2 ideas for the actual implementation:
>
>
>
> 1) Some kind of check() function in the init.d script, or a generic check() function
>
> that just checks with ps | grep.  This might typically be called after having the
>
> init script sleep for a certain amount of time.
>
>
>
> 2) Some kind of special init script that checks registered daemons after all services
>
> have started. (i.e. it depends on all daemons, or they are put into it’s config file).
>
> With this scheme we could avoid excessive sleeping during startup (to keep it fast),
>
> And perhaps even keep using service specific check() functions
>
>
>
> Does anyone else think this idea is worth looking into?
>

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90471

We managed this checking for the socket mysql always create on *nix .
But whit a timeout of five seconds if there is no error message nor
socket in that time the script assume the server started.
I'm the first to say that this need to be improved but it's a start.


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