Defining the workgroup objectives

[Sven Mueller]

Gerrit Pape wrote on 31/07/2005 19:17:

> You might be interested in this web page
>  http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/unix-daemon-design-mistakes-to-avoid.html

ARG. Not that page again. (OK, I'm exaggerating.) Granted, it does
mention a few good things, but also makes various mistakes itself IMHO:
Most importantly, it discourages use of syslog. Even with all its
disadvantages, I definately prefer daemons using syslog over any other
mechanism mostly because I (as the admin) can easily redirect the log to
remote hosts, log different parts of the information to different logs
(like log everything above debug to a file only kept for 24h while
logging everything from warn upwards to some file kept for a month).
With modern syslog implementations like syslog-ng I am able to divide or
merge logs from different programs or syslog facilities as I want. I
wouldn't be able to do so with daemons which always log to stdout/stderr.

The other advices are good to keep in mind though they do have flaws
themself because they don't even mention the downsides of the approach
they are recommending. One example is the don't background advice. A
daemon should allow some mechanism to put it in the background and
detach with its filedescriptors (especially STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR) closed,
so that the shell which started it can exit cleanly.

cu,
sven
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