General Information
This guide will help you set up Dan Bernstein’s daemontools, which is a program that supervises another daemon so that when it does fail, it will automatically be restarted.
Requirements
You will need the following items to be able to complete this guide:
- Root access to a FreeBSD machine
- FreeBSD install with ports up-to-date
Compiling
This is where your up-to-date ports come in handy.
# cd /usr/ports/sysutils/daemontools # make install
Setting up daemontools
There is not much to do. Create a directory, and then we also need to add an entry to /etc/rc.conf to tell it that we want to start svscan as the master process is called upon booting.
# mkdir /var/service # echo 'svscan_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
Starting svscan
There are two ways that you can start svnscan. Reboot your system, or execute its rc file.
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/svscan.sh start
It should now be running. To see if it really is running, check with ps.
# ps auxwwww | grep svscan
You should see /usr/local/bin/svscan running. Congratulations, you successfully got daemontools running.