runit
I need to run on a server a program that has to stay always alive. I could just add that to /etc/inittab. Or use something like
daemontools which I'm aldready using on this server here. As with most programs from
D. J. Bernstein that's working fine, with some excellent ideas, but for a few reasons it's actually not a really good choice :
- It's not free
- He doesn't support anymore his programs and it's not free so we can't do it for him. (actually it's possible like some people do for qmail, but you're only allowed to distribute patch, and no modified versions, so that sucks a little)
- It's not free so it's not very well integrated in a distribution such as Debian. You have to compile it yourself, or use unofficial binay packages (which are maybe not even legal).
- djb uses a strange Filesystem hierarchy for his programs, completly differement from what most people do. That's not the biggest problem, but I don't really like having a /command and /service directory :)
However this kind of program is really usefull, and much more clean than what is done with SysV-init scripts.
So I remembered
runit, and now I wonder what I didn't use that before.
Something like daemontools, but without the bad points. And there's even a
debian package for sarge :)