LSB-ish init script, RFC

[Matthew Farrellee]

Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Matthew Farrellee (mfarrellee+fedora at redhat.com) said: 
>> First, it wasn't sufficient for my service because anyone can run a copy of 
>> my service. They just have to have their own config file. Think of it like 
>> having both a system httpd, listening on port 80, and a user httpd, 
>> listening on port 1134. Both process names can easily be "httpd". This is a 
>> problem because /etc/init.d/functions' status() uses pidof, which can find 
>> a user's process and confuse it with a system process. This means running 
>> "service blah start" can silently fail because the init script thinks the 
>> service is already running, when only the user's copy of the service is 
>> running. To get around this I implemented my own rh_status, calling it 
>> pid_status, that uses a pidfile to determine if the service is running.
> 
> This seems to be a rather unusual case, though, especially since it implies
> you'd need customization just to specify an alternate config file.
> 
> Bill

It can happen whenever a user process shares its name with a service's 
process. This just tends to be a common thing with my package.


Best,


matt

P.S. I didn't see it mentioned anywhere in the wiki, but if you use 
killproc without a pidfile you can end up killing more things than you 
should.