ZaFx wrote:
I use to switch ISP often too, and I was aware of the DNS issue with
wwwoffle about the possibility of generating some lock-pages (or
lock-files?). Searching the internet I read something about the fact
that this problem happens only (or especially) if wwwoffle is run in
autodial mode. I never use this mode so I decided to try the
"/etc/init.d/wwwoffle restart" into /etc/ppp/ip-up. It's working pretty
good up to now so I was wondering whether it is really a bad thing or
not. Can someone give me some deeper explanation about the lockfiles
issue and the reason why it happens? Thank you all.
I used the "/etc/init.d/wwwoffle restart" method myself before I used
the other solutions I wrote about. It worked OK for me, but it's a
rather crude solution.
If WWWOFFLE is configured to use lockfiles and you kill wwwoffled, there
is always the risk of leaving behind lockfiles. This can also happen if
simply shutdown the system while unknown to you some wwwoffled child
processes are still waiting for a reply from a remote server and taking
a very long time to time out.
Stale lockfiles are very annoying because if you request a URL for which
a lockfile exists, the wwwoffled process handling your request will wait
for the lockfile to be removed (which will never happen if the process
which created the lockfile is dead) and give up after some time.
This is the reason I regularly run a shell script I wrote to remove
lockfiles, but you can also use "wwwoffle -purge".
If wwwoffled runs in autodial mode, running "/etc/init.d/wwwoffle
restart" from /etc/ppp/ip-up is of course a very bad idea, because
you're killing wwwoffled each time it triggers a dial out.
Whether this will necessarily leave behind lockfiles isn't clear to me,
but it will certainly produce very messy situations.
--
Paul A. Rombouts
My webpage for WWWOFFLE patches:
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~rombouts/wwwoffle.html
My webpage for pdnsd patches:
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~rombouts/pdnsd.html
