AutomaticStartup INITTAB method

The following is from Harald Koch on 04/2002

I'll offer an alternate method. Neither is really better or worse; it depends on your environment and requirements. I have a strong preference for running mission critical software directly from init, instead of from startup scripts; init will automatically restart software that crashes. I do this with misterhouse, SSH, and a database that I run. init is controlled from a file called (usually) /etc/inittab. Here's my MH entry from inittab:

 mh:2345:respawn:/home/mhouse/mhinit

This tells init to run ``/home/mhouse/mhinit when the computer is in any multi-user mode (see Mike's message for a definition of runlevels), and to run it again when it exits. And here's my script:

 ----- /home/mhouse/mhinit -----
 #!/bin/sh
 mhhome=/home/mhouse
 cd ${mhhome}
 exec >> error_log 2>&1
 export PATH=${mhhome}/mh/bin:${mhhome}/bin:$PATH
 export mh_parms=${mhhome}/mh.ini
 # rotate logs
 /bin/mv log.3 log.4
 /bin/mv log.2 log.3
 /bin/mv log.1 log.2
 /bin/mv log.0 log.1
 /bin/mv log   log.0
 # start
 exec ${mhhome}/mh/bin/mh -log_file ${mhhome}/log
 ----- /home/mhouse/mhinit -----

This method *does* make it harder to stop MH, because you have to edit /etc/inittab, change the ``respawn to ``off, and then run ``telinit q to tell init to re-read the config file. On the other hand, it means that MH will restart itself automatically even if it exits due to bad code, which does happen to me occaisionally.

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Additional note: Make sure your script is executable. chmod +x scriptname