watchdog processes

[Kevin Wang]

On Tue, 04 Jan 2005 23:02:52 +0000, Richard Worwood
<mlists at tdbnetworks.org> wrote:
> Does anyone know of a product or scripts I can use to periodically check
> that some key processes are running and restart as required?

periodically or constantly?  init can keep a process running from boot
time until system shutdown.  is messy if you need to pause it, ever,
though. typically I have to edit the config file rather than some
command-line method for controlling it.  Also output goes to the
console, so you need to make your own arrangements for debugging if
you don't have access to the console.  It is easy enough to exec
>/tmp/LOG 2>&1 from a shell script wrapper around your process.

it is effectively while True: os.system("your command here") but with
a few more smarts, like if it restarts too many times in one second,
it'll stop retrying for 5 minutes.

man inittab

   - Kevin