Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: My production site is down

I am not sure that Monit actually monitors anything except the existence of a pid file. This forces the user of Monit to create a startup script to figure out what the pid of a process is and write it to a file. But Monit can't guarantee that the pid actually is related to the process you want to monitor.

Monit also does a bunch of other things only slightly related to controlling the daemon process. Configuration is not easy, since it is different for each daemon you want to setup.

Monit seems to suffer the same problems as processes controlled with init.d files. Check out DJB's faq on the subject. One deficiency in svc is the inability to control the order in which services are started or stopped. This is what init.d does well. Of course you could use daemontools svc to control processes from your init.d files as well.

It is difficult to pick something and call it a standard. What is standard on Linux, doesn't work on FreeBSD. DJB software runs from the same location on every unix type system, he was forced to create his own standard for his software because of the lack of a standard between platforms. One really difficult standard is a definition of 'free'. Both GNU software and DJB software come with a Copyright. GNU, I guess, calls their stuff 'free', using their own definition of the term. If I were to guess DJB uses his copyright to protect the software he writes from hacking by less informed individuals, where the result would be complaints that his software doesn't work or has bugs. If that makes it un-free using the GNU definition, so what? I noticed that OpenACS.org doesn't mind using .gif images, which are un-free, how can OACS be 'free' if it contains .gif images (at least 194 of 'em)?

"Monit also does a bunch of other things only slightly related to controlling the daemon process. Configuration is not easy, since it is different for each daemon you want to setup."

Configuration of supervise is also not easy, since each daemon needs its own start script. I don't have that much experience with monit to be honest, and I never meant this to be a "monit vs supervise" war. Use whatever you like best. I just gave my personal opinion that djb tools are hard to setup and use.

"DJB software runs from the same location on every unix type system...

Overgeneralizations are dangerous. This will only be the case if you install it the djb way. It doesn't mean that it'll always be the way it'll happen. There are packages out there to build binaries out of djb tools and install them in more sane locations.

"If I were to guess DJB uses his copyright to protect the software he writes from hacking by less informed individuals"

What you did not say is that it also discourages very informed individuals from improving those tools, since their modifications have to be distributed as patches. The result would be more collaboration and better software for everybody, unless you believe djb is some sort of godly entity that is perfect and whose work is impossible to improve.

By "free" I meant "I can change it and redistribute my changes in binary and source forms". If you really need an answer to your "so what?" question, then I suppose (and I mean no offense with this) that you're missing the point about open source/free software, IMHO

The .gif's in OpenACS will eventually be replaced. This is a left-over. The images themselves are not un-free. The LZW algorithm, which is used to encode those images, is covered under patent.

-Roberto