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Permanent Measures
Eggdrops, for example, used to (?) come with a script that restarted them via cron if the program abended. Great - that keeps the eggdrop up if it dies. The implication, though, is that you kinda expect it to die, and you don't care why.
Not a good way to go. If the death of the program isn't visible to you (i.e., watching the bot connect to a channel, then die... eight hundred times a day) it's VERY bad.
What brought this on? Well, my application server died a few days ago of unknown causes - and it reminded me of a thought I'd had, to put it in a crontab to make sure it restarted. Then it hit me: "Why does it die?" The answer: I don't know yet. I'm looking. And I KNOW to look because I had to restart it unexpectedly.
Also, it reminded me that I'm probably in someone's killfile - and I don't really want to be, but the owner has probably forgotten about such a filter being put in place.
Hmmm....well, in the case of eggdrops, the cron method is useful because
some users want to create eggdrops who aren't box admins and won't be able
to add anything to the machine's init. This way, cron will just launch the
thing asap after boot.
Of course that points to the fact that maybe there should be a better way for non-admins to have personal init scripts...
Jacobim Mugatu