[NTLUG:Discuss] Service Watchdog Script

[Carl Haddick]

On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 02:17:03PM -0500, Brian Koontz wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 03:08:24PM -0500, Carl Haddick wrote:
> > Anyway, his daemontools package works well.  The idea is a watchdog is
> > run from init, and the watchdog starts and stops processes via a control
> > utility, svc.
> 
> It works well, but the documentation leaves a lot to be desired.  (DJB
> operates under the assumption that everyone is as intelligent as he
> believes himself to be.) 
> 
>   --Brian

Could be the root cause. :-)

I've used his daemontools for purposes beyond just the usual qmail
stuff.

UCSPITCP, or whatever it is - the Bernstein tcpserver stuff - can be
handy, too.  Tcpserver chains arbitrary commands together as a pipeline
to accomplish something useful, such as pop3 services, in response to
opening a TCP connection to a port.

Once needing to migrate users from an old qmail setup to a more modern
mail server I put two extra members in the tcpserver pipeline for pop3.
The passwords were politely stored crypted, but we needed them en clar.

So, I passed the user name and password thorugh pipes around the
backside, so to speak, of the password checking element of the tcpserver
pipeline.  If the password check failed, I threw them away.  If the
password check suceeded then I knew I had a good password which was then
logged to a root-owned file.

If that sounds evil, it wasn't.  It was just a transparent move to
better equipment, and to a non-qmail setup.  No user privacy was
violated.

Regards,

Carl