Subject: Re: ftpwho/ftpcount

From: Gregory A Lundberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1999 11:22:52 -0500 (EST)

On Fri, 8 Jan 1999, William Henry wrote:

> My guess is the PID gets reused quickly, this has only happened on the
> one or two occassions where I've rebooted my machine.  So it's either
> still seeing an old PID from "pre reboot" or all the startup activity
> is causing a quick reuse of PIDs.

Ah the old reboot problem for PID files.  It's generally a good idea to
have the cold-start script deleted any PID files it may find laying about
just to avoid this confusion.

I've seen this problem with other daemons as well; some won't start if
they find the PID file refers to an existing copy of the daemon and, since
at reboot, PID numbers tend to be rather deterministic, that happens far
too often.  I found that problem with syslogd, for instance, and added a
`rm -f /var/run/*.pid` to my startup script to fix it.

-- 

Gregory A Lundberg		Senior Partner, VRnet Company
1441 Elmdale Drive              [email-masked]
Kettering, OH 45409-1615 USA    1-800-809-2195