Comments on: Starting SQLGrey automatically

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 18:13:51 +0000

To follow up on my earlier post of 24 Dec 09 wherein I reported a small anomaly regarding sqlgrey behavior when started from launchd…

The sqlgrey author decided that when sqlgrey is NOT started as a daemon it should log to STDOUT as opposed to syslog, the way we Mac users want it. A few small code edits will get sqlgrey back to logging to mail.log and creating its pid file.

Whether you’re using v1.6.8 or v1.7.6, load the sqlgrey executable into your favorite code editor.

1. To get logging back into mail.log, search for
log_file => $opt{daemonize} ? 'Sys::Syslog' : undef,
and change it to
log_file => 'Sys::Syslog',

2. To get sqlgrey to write it’s pid file, necessary to allow the update_sqlgrey_config script to force re-reading it’s config files, search for
pid_file => $opt{daemonize} ? $dflt{pidfile} : undef,
and change it to
pid_file => $dflt{pidfile},

Another benefit of the above code edits is that sqlgrey-logstats.pl will, once again, find its log entries in mail.log in the format that it is expecting.

Holler if you have any questions.

Happy New Decade to all!

Bruce

By: Bruce

Bruce — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:06:59 +0000

Hi Rich,

Hope you enjoyed a Merry XMas. Have you had a chance to look into the anomalies that I reported?

Would appreciate it.

Bruce

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 13:50:41 +0000

Thank you, Richard. When you start looking into it you might also notice that sqlgrey-logstats.pl no longer produces output as the log entries written to, in this case, system.log, are in a different format than when sqlgrey writes to mail.log. Therefore, sqlgrey-logstats.pl no longer recognizes the entries as coming from sqlgrey.

Merry XMAS / Happy New Year,
Bruce

By: Richard

Richard — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 08:05:34 +0000

@Bruce, thanks for mentioning this. I had not noticed this but will have a look at it to see if we can improve here.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:23:49 +0000

Followed your instructions for installation of sqlgrey and the launchdaemon plist file. Thank you very much. I have noticed a few anomalies since running from launchd as opposed to running it as its own daemon and wondered if anyone else noticed these, too:

1. The sqlgrey pid file (defaults to (/var/run/sqlgrey.pid) is not created.

2. Logging seems to be written to console.log and system.log as opposed to mail.log.

Neither seems to be destructive (the update_sqlgrey_config script can’t restart sqlgrey since it can’t find it’s pid file) and all seems to be working well.

Has anyone else noticed these things?

Thanks,
Bruce

By: Richard

Richard — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:08:35 +0000

@Aryan, yes I removed the -d option. Still need to try this on Tiger, read the blog for more info.

By: Aryan Schmitz

Aryan Schmitz — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:05:28 +0000

Great, thanks for letting us know! What exactly did you change? I use Tiger (and have a LaunchDeamon file for SQLgrey in /Library/LaunchDaemonns) and there is no KeepAlive in Tiger but OnDemand -> True should almost have the same effect.
Under the key ProgramArguments
I have an array with
string -> /usr/sbin/sqlgrey
string -> -d

Is that the -d opion you removed?

/Aryan

By: Richard

Richard — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 07:41:14 +0000

I’ve got the KeepAlive option working, I just had to remove the -d option from the commandline. Instructions have been updated.

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:58:50 +0000

Thanks for the pointer to monit, I will have a look at it.

There is no reason not to use the launchd on Tiger, at the time I wrote the stuff for Tiger i was not comfortable using launchd but Leopard forced me into it

By: Aryan Schmitz

Aryan Schmitz — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:16:54 +0000

Thank youfor your reply Richard. On http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/postfix/2007-01/1083.html I see the suggestion to use a monitor utility called monit. It seems to work on Mac OSX as well http://monit.darwinports.com/ could that be a solution?

My other question was if there is any objection to use Launchd on Tiger to start SQLgrey in stead of a StartupItem?