I'm trying to launch a background process (a Python daemon to be exact) on my iPod (ios 6.1.6 jailbroken), but the Python process gets suspended eventually by the os.
Here are the things I tried to make it run in background:
Launch the process via MobileTerminal. It gets suspended when I hit the home button, same when installing MobileTerminal Backgrounder or configuring the MobileTerminal app to run in background mode with Background Manager.
SSH connect and launch the process with nohup, it also gets suspended. Setting the highest priority with nice also does not work.
Does anyone have some ideas how to achieve this? This must be possible, because processes like the openssh server seem to have permanent background.
I looked on the internet for quite a while, and the only helpful thing I found that might work is to set up a launch daemon, but this makes it not easy to stop / restart the process if I have to restart the device, and I do not know if it works for sure.
Thanks.
Related
I tried to do this with WMI, but interactive processes cannot be started with it (as stated in Microsoft documentation). I see processes in task manager, but windows do not show.
I tried with Paramiko, same thing. Process visible in task manager, but no window appears (notepad for example).
I tried with PsExec, but the only case a window appears on the remote machine, is when you specify -i and it does not show normally, only through a message box saying something like "a message arrived do you want to see it".
Do you know a way to start a program remotely, and have its interface behave like it would if you manually started it?
Thanks.
Normally the (SSH) servers run as a Windows service.
Window services run in a separate Windows session (google for "Session 0 isolation"). They cannot access interactive (user) Windows sessions.
Also note that there can be multiple user sessions (multiple logged in users) in Windows. How would the SSH server know, what user session to display the GUI on (even if it could)?
The message you are getting is thanks to the "Interactive Services Detection" service that detects that a service is trying to show a GUI on an invisible Session 0 and allows you to replicate the GUI on the user session.
You can run the SSH server in an interactive Windows session, instead as a service. It has its limitations though.
In general, all this (running GUI application on Windows remotely through SSH) does not look like a good idea to me.
Also this question is more about a specific SSH server, rather that about an SSH client you are using. So you you include details about your SSH server, you can get better answers.
ok i found a way. With subprocess schtasks( the windows task scheduler). For whatever reason, when i launch a remote process with it , it starts as if i had clicked myself on the exe. For it to start with no delay, creating the task to an old date like 2012 with schtasks /Create /F and running the then named task with schtasks /Run will do the trick
I am working on a chat program with Python. I would like to use nohup because users always can access server when I am logout.
I could run nohup very well. It was great.But I am a admin and I can write messages,and can see online users as using python. after I worked nohup, and logout, when I login I can't access the python progress. I want to foreground it again.
Yeah, I can see it in background with ps -aux . I see its PID,STAT but I don't know how to access it. I should access it.jobs doesn't see it. fg don't work. or I can't do. How can I do?
If you nohup a process, when you log out the parent of the process switches to being init (1) and you can't get control of it again.
The best approach is to have the program open a socket and then use that for ipc. You probably want to split your code in to 2 pieces - a daemon that runs in the background and keeps a socket open, and a client which connects to the socket to control the daemon.
I have an external server that I can SSH into. It runs bots on reddit.
Whenever I close the terminal window the bot is running in, the process stops, which means the bot stops as well.
I've tried using
nohup python mybot.py
but it doesn't work - when I close the window and check the processes (ps -e), python does not show up. Are there any alternatives to nohup? Ideally, that print the output to the terminal, instead of an external file.
Have you considered using tmux/screen? They have lots of features and can help you detach a terminal and re-attach to it at a later date without disrupting the running process.
I have written a module in Python and want it to run continuously once started and need to stop it when I need to update other modules. I will likely be using monit to restart it, if module has crashed or is otherwise not running.
I was going through different techniques like Daemon, Upstart and many others.
Which is the best way to go so that I use that approach through out my all new modules to keep running them forever?
From your mention of Upstart I will assume that this question is for a service being run on an Ubuntu server.
On an Ubuntu server an upstart job is really the simplest and most convenient option for creating an always on service that starts up at the right time and can be stopped or reloaded with familiar commands.
To create an upstart service you need to add a single file to /etc/init. Called <service-name>.conf. An example script looks like this:
description "My chat server"
author "your#email-address.com"
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]
env AN_ENVIRONMENTAL_VARIABLE=i-want-to-set
respawn
exec /srv/applications/chat.py
This means that everytime the machine is started it will start the chat.py program. If it dies for whatever reason it will restart it. You don't have to worry about double forking or otherwise daemonizing your code. That's handled for you by upstart.
If you want to stop or start your process you can do so with
service chat start
service chat stop
The name chat is automatically found from the name of the .conf file inside /etc/init
I'm only covering the basics of upstart here. There are lots of other features to make it even more useful. All available by running man upstart.
This method is much more convenient, than writing your own daemonization code. A 4-8 line config file for a built in Ubuntu component is much less error prone than making your code safely double fork and then having another process monitor it to make sure it doesn't go away.
Monit is a bit of a red herring. If you want downtime alerts you will need to run a monitoring program on a separate server anyway. Rely on upstart to keep the process always running on a server. Then have a different service that makes sure the server is actually running. Downtime happens for many different reasons. A process running on the same server will tell you precisely nothing if the server itself goes down. You need a separate machine (or a third party provider like pingdom) to alert you about that condition.
You could check out supervisor. What it is capable of is starting a process at system startup, and then keeping it alive until shutdown.
The simplest configuration file would be:
[program:my_script]
command = /home/foo/bar/venv/bin/python /home/foo/bar/scripts/my_script.py
environment = MY_ENV_VAR=FOO, MY_OTHER_ENV_VAR=BAR
autostart = True
autorestart = True
Then you could link it to /etc/supervisord/conf.d, run sudo supervisorctl to enter management console of supervisor, type in reread so that supervisor notices new config entry and update to display new programs on the status list.
To start/restart/stop a program you could execute sudo supervisorctl start/restart/stop my_script.
I used old-style initscript with start-stop-daemon utility.Look at skel in /etc/init.d
Updated post:
I have a python web application running on a port. It is used to monitor some other processes and one of its features is to allow users to restart his own processes. The restart is done through invoking a bash script, which will proceed to restart those processes and run them in the background.
The problem is, whenever I kill off the python web application after I have used it to restart any user's processes, those processes will take take over the port used by the python web application in a round-robin fashion, so I am unable to restart the python web application due to the port being bounded. As a result, I must kill off the processes involved in the restart until nothing occupies the port the python web application uses.
Everything is ok except for those processes occupying the port. That is really undesirable.
Processes that may be restarted:
redis-server
newrelic-admin run-program (which spawns another web application)
a python worker process
UPDATE (6 June 2013): I have managed to solve this problem. Look at my answer below.
Original Post:
I have a python web application running on a port. This python program has a function that calls a bash script. The bash script spawns a few background processes, then exits.
The problem is, whenever I kill the python program, the background processes spawned by the bash script will take over and occupy that same port.
Specifically the subprocesses are:
a redis server (with daemonize = true in the configuration file)
newrelic-admin run-program (spawns a web application)
a python worker process
Update 2: I've tried running these with nohup. Only the python worker process doesnt attempt to take over the port after I kill the python web application. The redis server and newrelic-admin still do.
I observed this problem when I was using subprocess.call in the python program to run the bash script. I've tried a double fork method in the python program before running the bash script, but it results in the same problem.
How can I prevent any processes spawned from the bash script from taking over the port?
Thank you.
Update: My intention is that, those processes spawned by the bash script should continue running if the python application is killed off. Currently, they do continue running after I kill off the python application. The problem is, when I kill off the python application, the processes spawned by the bash script start to take over the port in a round-robin fashion.
Update 3: Based on the output I see from 'pstree' and 'ps -axf', processes 1 and 2 (the redis server and the web app spawned by newrelic-admin run-program) are not child processes of the python web application. This makes it even weirder that they take over the port that the python web application occupies when I kill it... Anyone knows why?
Just some background on the methods I've tried to solve my above problem, before I go on to the answer proper:
subprocess.call
subprocess.Popen
execve
the double fork method along with one of the above (http://code.activestate.com/recipes/278731-creating-a-daemon-the-python-way/)
By the way, none of the above worked for me. Whenever I killed off the web application that executes the bash script (which in turns spawns some background processes we shall denote as Q now), the processes in Q will in a round-robin fashion, take over the port occupied by the web application, so I had to kill them one by one before I could restart my web application.
After many days of living with this problem and moving on to other parts of my project, I thought of some random Stack Overflow posts and other articles on the Internet and from my own experience, recalled my experience of ssh'ing into a remote and starting a detached screen session, then logging out, and logging in again some time later to discover the screen session still alive.
So I thought, hey, what the heck, nothing works so far, so I might as well try using screen to see if it can solve my problem. And to my great surprise and joy it does! So I am posting this solution hopefully to help those who are facing the same issue.
In the bash script, I simply started the processes using a named screen process. For instance, for the redis application, I might start it like this:
screen -dmS redisScreenName redis-server redis.conf
So those processes will keep running on those detached screen sessions they were started with. In this case, I did not daemonize the redis process.
To kill the screen process, I used:
screen -S redisScreenName -X quit
However, this does not kill the redis-server. So I had to kill it separately.
Now, in the python web application, I can just use subprocess.call to execute the bash script, which will spawn detached screen sessions (using 'screen -dmS') which run the processes I want to spawn. And when I kill off the python web application, none of the spawned processes take over its port. Everything works smoothly.