Re: mars has strange behaviour -- how to package?

[Ben Pfaff <pfaffben@pilot.msu.edu>]

   mars-nwe is a netware server, which I'm working on packaging.
   However, it has some behaviour which is not entirely policy-friendly.

   Specifically:

   1. It likes to print out a "starting up" type message of its own;
      should I just redirect it to /dev/null?

Either do that, or edit the source not to print the message.

   2. It provides a way to kill itself, rather than using start-stop-daemon;
      which should I use? Unfortunately bugs in the version I tried to
      package most recently with libc6 means it wouldn't die at all, but
      I've got a newer version to try now.

Use whichever works better.  If it kills itself, does it clean up
better than if start-stop-daemon is used?

   3. When you kill it, it wants 10 seconds to shutdown. This is quite 
      reasonable, because it likes to notify all the logged in Netware
      users it has before it logs them out. Can I just put in a sleep
      to wait until it is gone, or some other check to wait until it has
      finished? It also likes to print some messages when it is being
      killed -- more trouble, see #1.

Waiting until it is done shutting down seems reasonable.  Here is what
I did to my /etc/init.d/dhcpc to make sure it waits for dhcp to come
up when it starts:

    echo -n "Starting DHCP client daemon: dhcpcd"
    rm -f /tmp/dhcp-up
    start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --exec $DAEMON -- -c /etc/dhcpc/up $IFACE
    echo "."
    echo -n "Waiting for DHCP to come up...  "
    count=60
    while ! test -e /tmp/dhcp-up && test $count != 0; do
	sleep 1
	count=`expr $count - 1`
    done
    if test -e /tmp/dhcp-up; then
	echo "done."
    else
	echo "failed."
    fi

where the /etc/dhcpc/up touches a file /tmp/dhcp-up.  Now, obviously
you'd want a more secure location than /tmp for a distributed script,
but this works pretty well with the unreliable and slow dhcp we have
around here.


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