[rrd-developers] [patch] rrdcached init script and spec file

[Daniel.Pocock at barclayscapital.com]

> > The init script does not work on my system (CentOS 4.x) as 
> is, because 
> > the `daemon` function which I have does not support --pidfile -- is 
> > that argument necessary?

My target for this is RHEL5 - in other words, although I have to run the
gmond agent on quite a diverse range of servers from different
generations of RHEL and other systems, I run gmetad and rrdcached on
machines that are up to date.

--pidfile checks if the process is already running - however, I believe
such a check is made within the program as well, so it is probably not
needed and can be dropped for backwards compatibility with RHEL4/Centos4

When I added that argument, I was hoping that the daemon() function
would also clean up stale PID files, but looking at the
/etc/rc.d/init.d/functions code I can't see any evidence that it does
so.  Therefore, cleaning up stale PID files needs to be done within
rrdcached.

> >
> > Also, as discussed previously, I think it would be a good idea to 
> > create a 'rrdcached' user and group and start the daemon as 
> that user 
> > instead of nobody.  For application-specific (eg. Ganglia) 
> > implementations, we can just put the necessary users (such 
> as nobody, 
> > apache, ganglia) in the rrdcached group.

That sounds fine. Who should own the RRD files, rrdcached or ganglia?

> 
> I think coupled with a split of the package into a cached and 
> a normal one this would be a sensible thing. As I said before 
> the daemon should NOT run as nobody since it writes files and 
> there must never be any files oned by nobody ... (hence the name).

I have no objection to splitting the package, it seems like a sensible
idea for something that most people hopefully will never need.  You will
notice that the init script checks /etc/default/rrdcached for the
variable RUN_RRDCACHED.  That variable is 0 by default, so the current
package won't start the daemon on an unconfigured system.

Regards,

Daniel
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