Keeping a process alive

Hello, all!

Just for fun, I've set up my Linux RH 7.2 (I know... I should upgrade) box
as a streaming audio encoder and server.  I'm encoding Butler County police
scanner audio and streaming it to whoever is interested. I have a web page
set up to provide access to the stream:

http://users.sctelcom.net/~jdlucas/scanner/

(it works most of the time, unless my ISP changes my IP on me, then I have
to edit the web page...)

Anyone is more than welcome to try it; Butler County isn't all that
exciting, though.  I'm working on setting up a stereo stream; one channel
Butler County, the other Sedgwick (I have a scanner that will monitor
trunked systems.)

I'm using "darkice" as the soundcard-to-mp3 stream encoder, and "icecast" as
the server, both on the same machine, a PII 350MHz.

The problem I'm having is that darkice is kind of unstable, meaning it may
run anywhere from 30 minutes to 30 hours before crashing, but it will
eventually crash.

I currently have the darkice configuration set up so that it runs 5 hours 59
minutes and 45 seconds before shutting down, and I have the crontab set up
to restart the process every 6 hours.  At best, you get a 15 second gap in
the audio every six hours; at worst, the server is dead for about 6 hours.

I'm looking for something to stick in the crontab to check if the darkice
process is running every 30 minutes or so, and, if it is, leave it alone,
and if it has died, restart it.

Perhaps crontab isn't the best answer?  I'm open to suggestions...

By the way, the darkice encoder insists on running with superuser
privileges... something about threading.

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks!
--John


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