Re: start-stop-daemon.... for the love of GOD! Why?

["Mike" <stuff@dustsmoke.com>]

> On Mon, Dec 12, 2005 at 01:11:44AM -0700, Mike wrote:
>> I'm baffled.... I can start this by running
>> "/etc/init.d/mythbackend start" after the computer starts but when
>> its starting up it just says its starting but never does.
>>
>> How on earth would I trouble shoot something like this if it isn't
>> going to tell me why it isn't starting it? And can somebody remind
>> me why source functions and the normal every day linux way of doing
>> this wasn't good enough for debian?
>
> Source functions?  Huh?

normally you just have a set of source functions library like /etc/init.d/functions or some other path that you use
for your init scripts. Debian has decided to daomonize it with this start-stop-daemon thing they made up. I guess I
could create my own functions file and go through all of that but I figured when in rome...

>
>> Thanks, this is what I'm trying to get to start right after MySQL
>> starts... which it tries to do and looks like it does, but doesn't.
>> Any ideas? I'm on sarge if that matters.
>
> If it is running, but mysteriously failing only during bootup, it sounds
> like an ordering problem or maybe even a race condition -- like maybe
> mysql startup script exits before mysql opens its port, myth fails
> because mysql is not yet available.  It could also be an environment
> problem, which would be a bug in the script.
>
> You could try putting a sulogin immediately before the mythbackend
> script in your runlevel then running mythbackend manually.  If it works
> you've ruled out ordering and should check for environment problems by
> stopping mythbackend, putting it last in the runlevel and proceeding to
> boot; if that works you've ruled out environment and should investigate
> the race condition.
>
> A more direct approach may be to get mythbackend to tell you why it's
> failing.
>

Thanks for replying,

I ended up getting mythbackend to tell me why its failing. It was due to start-stop-daemon using '/' rather than the
users home that I thought it would change to with the chuid flag. Resulting in it trying to read things like
/.somedir/somefile rather than /home/user/.somedir/somefile. No idea how to fix that without changing the mythtv,
start-stop-daemon or just copying that file down to the root filesystem.

-Mike