[launchd-dev] Diagnosing launchd daemon failure to launch

[Damien Sorresso]

On Nov 7, 2008, at 7:13 AM, Ned Hogan wrote:
> I am confused, I thought the purpose of setting the sticky bit on / 
> var/tmp was so you could count on your files being persistent there?  
> What comes along and cleans out this directory?

D'oh! I was thinking of /private/tmp, not /var/tmp. Sorry.

> This is not to say your suggestion to to move to /var/run is not  
> valid, but the code I inherited uses /var/tmp based on the security  
> concerns at the time.
>
> The daemon, now best described as a LaunchAgent on Leopard that is  
> in production I want to move to the launchd model from it's current  
> StartupItems implementation. However I am not quite clear on how to  
> let the domain socket listener know that I have been killed and  
> restarted, is it my job to kill off the listener and restart, or  
> could I create another another launchd task to watch for the  
> creation of a new domain socket and would cause the listener to  
> reconnect? For security reasons you do want to create a new domain  
> socket, right?

No. In the launchd model, launchd will hold a file descriptor for the  
Unix domain socket and listen on it. When data are available, launchd  
will start your agent up. Your agent will then check in with launchd  
and obtain the file descriptor and start reading from it. If your  
agent dies when there is still unread data on the socket, it'll be  
started back up, and you can pick up where you left off in the stream.

Let launchd worry about the socket. All your agent needs to know is  
that it was launched because there are data on the socket that need to  
be read.

> In testing I have also noticed that I can loop when launched, how  
> would I set a limit or a backoff with a runaway launchd process?


See launchd.plist(5), specifically, the KeepAlive criteria.
-- 
Damien Sorresso
BSD Engineering
Apple Inc.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 2474 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/launchd-dev/attachments/20081107/866e4fd1/attachment.bin>