[Labs-l] Bigbrother is watching...

[Marc A. Pelletier]

... if you ask it to.

I've deployed a first version of the bigbrother daemon, that will watch
tool jobs you specify and restart them if they fail for any reason.

=== What it does ===

If one of the jobs it tracks is not running (or pending), it will
attempt to start it again.  Bigbrother will attempt to start a job up to
five times in a 24h window; throttling further restarts.

If it restarts a job, or fails to do so, it will send an email to the
tool's maintainers, and log to ~/bigbrother.log

=== How to use it ===

For every job you want to watch, you have add a line to ~/.bigbrotherrc
(that file is checked for jobs to watch every couple minutes).

It understands exactly two types of entries:

  webservice [-tomcat]

will watch for a webservice, and issue a 'webservice start' if it stops; and

  jstart -N <jobname> [more options]

will watch for a continuous job by the specified name, using the
specified command line to restart it if it stops.  Please note that the
-N option is mandatory, and must be the first specified option.

Any other entry will be ignored, and cause an error (that will also be
mailed to the tool's maintainers).

Any output from webservice or jstart will be appended to the
bigbrother.log file.

-- Marc