Re: restart behavior (initscript)

This is my interpretation of the spec.. so it very well may be wrong.

Ademar de Souza Reis Jr. wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I have doubts about the behavior of the restart
> action in the following scenarios:
> 
> (i)
> The daemon (sshd in my case) is misconfigured, so
> after stopping it, it will not (re)start.
> 
>   Can I check for the presence of this scenario and refuse
>   to stop the service in the first place?

I'd consider this an undefined situation, however my feeling would be a 
stop followed by an aborted start.  The end result is the daemon has 
been stopped and an error message/status code sent to the user.

> (ii)
> When the daemon (sshd again) receives a SIGHUP, it spawns a
> new copy of itself and kills the old parent process, but the
> childs are kept alive.
> 
>   Since there's a new parent process (the one who accepts
>   new connections), can I consider this the same of a
>   restart?

This would be the "reload" case.  It is my interpretation that a restart 
must do exactly that.  Stop the current daemon, and fully restart it. 
The restart is useful if the physical binary changes, while a reload is 
useful if the configuration changes.

> So, should the spec of the restart action be interpreted
> as a "start" followed by a "stop" or can I implement this
> kind of behavior?

That is how I have interpreted it, and how MontaVista init scripts work.

--Mark