We have a process running on a new server that's leaking memory and then crashing. Tracking this down is on the TODO list, but to prevent myself from getting more alerts in the middle of the night I needed to install something that would respawn the job.

Previous servers here have daemontools installed (which needs a multi step install process on deb systems: installing daemontools-installer, building the package, installing the freshly built package). I went ahead and built the package.

I then had a mild panic attack when installation failed because /etc/inittab was missing. Traditionally, on Unix systems, /etc/inittab is one of those files you're especially careful with - it's the configuration of init, pid 1.

This server was in fact the first server I'd dealt with running Ubuntu Edgy Eft. And Edgy is the first release to use Upstart as an init replacement, and upstart doesn't use /etc/inittab.

deamontools can be made to install by running

touch /etc/inittab

SV:123456:respawn:/command/svscanboot

Then, to get the job to work with upstart, you need to create the file /etc/event.d/daemontools with the following

# daemontools - svscanboot
#
# runs in all levels
# 

start on runlevel-2
start on runlevel-3
start on runlevel-4
start on runlevel-5

stop on shutdown

respawn /command/svscanboot

This may be a redundant use of daemontools, since I suspect the functionallity that we're using is already available in upstart. However, since we only have one system at the moment using upstart and it still seems to be undergoing initial development, we probably won't be switching over all of our jobs until upstart is available in (at least) an Ubuntu Long-Term-Support release.