On Mon, 13 Nov 2006, Steve [Gentoo] wrote:
While system-level services are typically managed by /etc/init.d/* in Gentoo, these are maintained by root for all users. I'm interested in an end-user without root access who wants to 'run a service-like process' (for example, fectmail to poll remote accounts...) While an end user can easily run a daemon process or kill one, this doesn't persist across a reboot. I've tried using fcron to schedule user processes to re-start after a re-boot... but this feels like a hack.
Use daemontools. It's in portage. Take a look at this site, which is beginner-friendly: http://www.thedjbway.org A run script for fetchmail is in http://smarden.org/runit/runscripts.html#fetchmail but you can probably cook your own once you get used to daemontools. You probably want your service to be kept alive, even when it goes down for whatever reason other than rebooting, so daemontools seems the proper solution. I'm assuming you have root privileges but don't want to run services as root when that's not really necessary. Otherwise, you'll need root's cooperation. -- Jorge Almeida -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
