[Spread-users] Re: [Wackamole-users] restarting automaticaly the Wackamole service

[Theo Schlossnagle]

Yair Amir wrote:

>Hi Theo,
>
>I really am not sure what the problem is.
>
>I run Spread and immediately I run a client program (sptuser) that
>connects and joins a group.
>
You don't want that trigger that behaviour with wackamole.  If Spread 
starts and hasn't performed a daemon membership yet (comes up alone at 
first), then wackamole will start, see no peers and then assume all the 
IP address which will confuse everyone tremendously.  You really only 
want wackamole to work on stable, settled Spread rings.  Hence the 10 
seconds -- which works "most" of the time for me.  On some machines I 
set it up to 1 minute.

>Spread takes a few seconds to complete the membership, but once it
>does, the client gets a response for the join. Is your case different?
>
On some of my machine it can take 15 - 30 seconds to complete the daemon 
memebership join.

>In general, forking, setsid, etc. are things I would usually avoid if not
>necessary in order to keep the code simple and portable to any kind of
>environment (not only unix).
>  
>
All of the code now "knows" if it is unix by arch.h.  And the autoconf 
patches I supplied make it very easy to use setsid and fork only if they 
are available.

Spread is supposed to be a daemon... Like it or not, daemons on unix 
should setsid and fork... it's just they way things are -- as dictated 
by Stevens ;-)  Otherwise the process is susceptable to receiving 
unwanted signals from its parent process and has a controlling terminal 
(which it should not).

-- 
Theo Schlossnagle
Principal Consultant
OmniTI Computer Consulting, Inc. -- http://www.omniti.com/
Phone:  +1 301 776 6376       Fax:  +1 410 880 4879
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