[ic] Unexplained Interchange crashes

[Peter]

On 23/08/22 22:35, Phil Smith wrote:
> Hello All
> 
> I am hoping for some advice on a problem I have.
> 
> This Interchange server has been up working 24/7 for several years, and 
> interchange has been rock solid and never crashes.
> 
> The physical server was moved to a new building, and since then the 
> Interchange service randomly stops for no obvious reason.
> 
> As this service is started from /etc/init.d I cannot get it to simply 
> respawn a new process.
> 
> Has anyone any tips on diagnosing why the process just dies, or a better 
> way of restarting IC if it randomly stops?

If it's crashing just since you moved the server to a new building and 
you literally changed nothing else then the issue has to be 
environmental, or hardware-related.  Something as simple as a power 
glitch could cause issues that you did not anticipate.

That said, what you can do for now, and it's probably a good idea to do 
anyways, is set up a "watchdog" task that runs from cron.  Have it 
attempt to fetch an IC page and if it cannot then it should restart the 
service (and send you a notice that it did).

If you're running a Linux distribution with systemd then consider using 
a systemd .service file to start IC instead of an init.d script.  Here's 
one I use, with an additional line I recently added to tell systemd to 
automatically restart IC on failure.  Note you can get this file by 
unpacking the interchange package from GhettoForge.  Note also that I've 
changed the locations of many of the interchange files in this to be 
more appropriate to a packaged interchange, so you may have to change 
some of this stuff (or omit some of the *Directory directives alltogether).

See systemd documentation to see how all of this works:

# /usr/lib/systemd/system/interchange.service
[Unit]
Description=Interchange web application platform
After=syslog.target network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
PIDFile=/var/run/interchange/interchange.pid
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/sysconfig/network
User=interch
Group=interch
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/interchange -q
ExecStop=/usr/sbin/interchange -q --stop
RuntimeDirectory=interchange
CacheDirectory=interchange
LogsDirectory=interchange
StateDirectory=interchange
ConfigurationDirectory=interchange


[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

# /etc/systemd/system/interchange.service.d/override.conf
[Service]
Restart=on-failure



Peter