/etc/init.d/script, or /etc/inittab – respawn on die

daemoninitinit-scriptsysvinit

I have a daemon/service (milter-regex), that is dying. I'm only using it temporarily (A few months), so don't care too much, but I want it to restart when it dies.

It is an init.d script. 'service milter-regex start' etc. The init script lives at /etc/init.d/milter-regex

I know if I have something in /etc/inittab, it will automagically respawn if it dies. Are init scripts supposed to do this as well, or do I need to put it in inittab?

It could be failing to restart as it isn't cleaning up a stale sock file, which I will fix today, but thought I'd ask the question anyway.

Running on RHEL4 (Yes, old)

Thanks, Brock

Best Answer

Scripts in init.d don't get rerun automatically when the service crashes. If you want to do the minimum amount of work to make sure it runs, inittab may be your best bet. It's icky though, almost as icky as still running RHEL 4.

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1) I'm afraid that it's the latter. But don't feel bad, most people trip over it.

2+3) The only ones that would have a chance of working are 5 and 8. The startup scripts and cron have no idea of your login session, so there's no way they could point remind or gmessage in the right direction. And 5 didn't work because the ampersand at the end is a feature of the shell, not the command. You likely don't even need it if the command is being run as a startup application.

Which script from /etc/init.d/ started the process

An easy way to follow the PPID chain backwards is with the pstree tool:

pstree -p PID

This will show all the parent processes of the specified PID, for example:

$ pstree 42284
-+= 00001 root /sbin/launchd
 \-+= 00199 jack /sbin/launchd
   \-+= 00254 jack /Applications/iTerm.app/Contents/MacOS/iTerm -psn_0_90134
     \-+= 00309 root login -fp jack
       \-+= 00310 jack -bash
         \--= 42284 jack vim site.txt

Best Answer

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Which script from /etc/init.d/ started the process

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