sshd and file descriptors

[Andreas Hasenack]

Em Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 09:14:45AM -0500, Ben Lindstrom escreveu:
> >From a full time admin view the concept that an RPM randomly restarts my
> services without me telling it SUCKS.

Randomly? Not at all. Without telling you? Not at all again.

> Why?  Configuration files changes.  I've seen too many people do RPM
> upgrades of critical services only to have a service that is working to
> fail or worse yet an interrupted connection which drops the ssh connection
> now leaving them unable to log into the box.

The current ssh session is untouched. I can call "service sshd stop" on a
server in Antartica if I want to (those penguins know linux :). 
Besides, the config file is untouched if the user has made any changes to 
it. The worst that could happen is for some reason the new daemon won't 
start, some previous option that is no longer valid for the new version.
This is told visually to the user, he/she will see in red FAILED.

In my opinion, the tradeoff is OK.

> *ANYONE* saying a package manager should automately restart services
> without user interaction is cursing their users to pain and suffering.

Those users will also be in pain if they forget to restart the service. And
this happens very often, I've seen users upgrading apache before the weekend
and forgetting to restart it and going home relieved. Poor bastards. Worse,
their server just halted during the weekend when logrotate kicked in and
HUPed the daemon.

> =)  I'll stop ranting on the topic.

It's quite off-topic, yes :) I was just asking about those file descriptors :)