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:

1. Root access to a FreeBSD machine
   
2. 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.

This guide is © 2005 - 2012 Bert JW Regeer.

Author: Bert JW Regeer
bsdguides at 0x58 dot com