I'm looking for some good resources on running daemontools on a NetBSD box. I've installed the binary package via pkg_add, but I can't seem to find an rc script for starting, e.g., svscan. I'm mostly a Linux and FreeBSD user, and this is the sort of thing I would expect to find after an install. Did I just look in the wrong place? Should I be building from source to find those sorts of extras? Is there a good guide somewhere that covers things like this? Thanks.
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Hank Gay
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Vanilla Bernstein daemontools installs by way of the package/run program, invoked by the package/install program. This determines whether the operating system uses System 5 rc or the old BSD rc, and updates either /etc/inittab or /etc/rc.local accordingly.
van Smoorenburg rc (from Linux operating systems) is a portability nightmare, and Mewburn rc (as used nowadays on FreeBSD and NetBSD) had barely (just under 6 months) been brought out for NetBSD and didn't exist at all on other BSDs when daemontools 0.76 came out in July 2001.
Whereas, on the other hand, /etc/inittab is a thing of the past, and on operating systems such as Ubuntu Linux /etc/rc.local has actually been superseded thrice over — by van Smoorenburg rc, then by upstart, and then by systemd. (It's a mere twice over superseded on CentOS.)
That leaves pretty much nothing in vanilla Bernstein daemontools.
Various people have addressed this deficit over the years.
- Norikatsu Shigemura made a Mewburn
rcfile for FreeBSD in 2004. - Jim Caroll published upstart job files for daemontools in 2006.
- Gerrit Pape made systemd service unit files for daemontools for the "daemontools-run" package that xe maintains for Debian Linux in 2014.
Shigemura's Mewburn rc script from the start incorporated the knowledge that svscanboot is a thing of the past, too. It could handle invoking a log dæmon for the output of svscan (and its supervise children) itself. By 2007, it had no need for readproctitle at all.
The nosh toolset can handle daemontools services, and has a svscan-compatible mode of operation as well as a package that provides Mewburn rc files for running the nosh service manager and service scanner under Mewburn rc. For more information, look in the nosh Guide in the chapter entitled "Compatible old-style startup", accessible with
xdg-open /usr/local/share/doc/nosh/svscan-startup.html
Further reading
- Jonathan de Boyne Pollard (2015).
/etc/inittabis a thing of the past.. Frequently Given Answers. - Jonathan de Boyne Pollard (2015). The known problems with System 5
rc. Frequently Given Answers. - Jim Caroll (2006). DaemontoolsUpstartConfig. Upstart wiki.
- Joern Heissler (2014-06-19). daemontools-run: Add systemd support. Debian Bug #752075.
- Andrew George Hammond (2007-04-17). sysutils/daemontools svscan output to multilog would be a nice option. FreeBSD bug #111749.
- daemontools. Debian package tracker.
- Daniel J. Bernstein (2001). How to install daemontools. daemontools.
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I once did this on OpenBSD and followed http://openbsd.totorux.info/openbsd-wiki.org/index.php/Installing_Daemontools
Maybe it can help under NetBSD, too?
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This is not for daemontools, but could be an alternative that works/compiles in netbsd: https://immortal.run/source/ There is no current port but works straight forward
nbari
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