You’re right, we should try to get Noam Wasserman on the show! That would make for a great interview.

Wondering when the next episode will be available? I hope you guys are getting even now so you could still move forward 😉

Thanks again.

What you really need to do is take care of two situations: service crashing (should restart immediately), service hangs (process doesn’t crash, but doesn’t handle requests – restart as soon as detected). The first one can be handled by any new init-like system – upstart, systemd, supervisord, daemontools, etc. Older sysv/init will allow you to start the process during bootup, but will not make sure it’s running all the time.

For the restart-on-crash situation you don’t actually need more than what new distributions already provide. This is usually what people recommend monit for, but it’s not necessary. Upstart will restart service automatically if you use the “respawn” option. Systemd will do that for “Restart=on-abort”. Supervisord will do that by default. Use whatever your system provides you from the start.

For the restart-on-hang, monit can be useful. It can also notify you by email / some other means that the service is misbehaving. Just remember that this action will always lag behind the service failure, so it’s not so good for actually reacting to crashes. This article has more info regarding “don’t start programs, run programs” approach. http://dustin.github.com/2010/02/28/running-processes.html

And good luck with any projects – started, finished, failed, successful, … There are always going to be haters, especially on the internet. Please don’t let them turn this podcast into a drama hour of explaining your decisions to anonymous internet trolls. 🙂

AppIgnite: I wouldn’t go so far as to say whether Jason finished AppIgnite or not
doesn’t affect anyone but himself and his family. Even if I only speak for
myself, I’ve learnt a lot from everything Jason has shared with regards to
AppIgnite, right up to (and including) your decision to step away from it. So
thanks! They always say you learn from your failures, I think in this instance a
lot of techzing listeners will have learnt with you.

The amount of stuff you both get through is very inspiring, don’t let the haters
get you down.

Partnerships: I found it interesting to hear Jason’s distaste for partnerships,
a lot of the overhead he described parallels with the reasons Rob Walling doesn’t
want to take Jason’s investment offers 🙂

Site Design: Just bite the bullet and buy a wordpress theme from themeforest or
something. Not an amazing custom design, but would probably take an hour to
install and configure, and will help the site look much better in the mean time.

Catalyst: How about CORS for the cross origin stuff? I’ve done a little with it
before, don’t recall having any trouble
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing

You seem to be attracting a bit of internet “criticism” lately. I have zero experience with this, so as a random person on the internet I am 100% qualified to comment.

Basically, you should just take it as a compliment. It’s probably because of a combination of: (1) You do start and get a lot of things done, which makes people who don’t insecure. (2) Listening to the show we get excited and frustrated with you and then (ironically) take it out on you. (3) Some people don’t know how not to be mean in text.

We evolved over millions of years to deal with other (relatively) smart hairless apes in groups of ten or so. Bonding by catching fish and making pottery, fighting off evil hairless apes and sitting around talking (or grunting) to each other in person. I’m sure settling down in villages was confusing. We’re still recovering from that time we all had to move to the city and get jobs. That was just a few generations ago. The fish and pottery with 4 of your cousins part went on for hundreds of thousands of years. Big chunks of our psyche and even our culture come from those times. Did you know that the story of Noah (or some version of the Flood Myth) dates back at least to the beginning of written history. It could very well be tens of thousands of years old. Some pieces of culture so old that our brains have had time to evolve to them.

Now we are interacting with these two guys on the other side of the world by plugging a pair of headphones into a magic rock with bluetooth while using a big complicated contraption that lets us run up a hill without using a hill. They’re saying stuff and a part of our brain is following. Another part of our brain thinks we must be chasing an antelope and a third part is trying to figure out how to talk back to the guys in the magic bluetooth rock. It disagrees with the voice or it just wants to participate but it can’t see the source of the voice and it can’t argue with it. All it can do is write a trollish comment or email.

Sometimes the result is a nasty comment. It’s a malfunction. Our brain isn’t built for this. It isn’t a reflection of anything real.

Sincerely,
random internet person

This is done by the init system of linux called the SysV/Init script/system/framework. This is the core of a linux machine as it starts all the processes: apache, mail, network, mysql, …

Experience has shown some flaws in this way of booting a linux systems: like not restarting a failed process for example. Lately other systems have been developped to replace this system and to provide more functionnality. Mainly we talk about: upstart (which is used by Ubuntu) and systemd (which is used by RedHat).

So your VPS instance should either have the SysV/init or systemd as it runs CentOS a RedHat derivative. What is sure is that you are going to have a hell of a time replacing this by upstart. You will need to install upstart (configuring/compiling/installing), configure linux to run upstart instead of SysV at boot and migrate the existing daemon like apache, mysql, etc. to be started by upstart.

An easier way is to create a SysV/init script that will start your node.js process and install it on the system. This way your process is automatically started when your VPS boots.

You may copy an existing scripts and tweak it for your use case. They are under /etc/init.d if you are using SysV.

To restart your node.js process in case it crashes, there should be no need for that. A proper system running as a daemon should never crash. It is a problem of node.js if it crashes.

No system is perfect and it may be a good idea to restart your process automatically on crash. For this, you could write a script that starts your process and if it exits, it gets restarted. This is just wrapping a WHILE loop around starting your process.

It is just a start as for a robust, state of the art system, it may not be a good idea to always restart your process. Maybe 5 times at most per minute…

Here monit may help

I am also sure that you know about http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4018154/node-js-as-a-background-service and particularly the approved answer.

Good luck with your project !