[Rt-devel] webmux connecting to the database; causing mod_perl startup to fail

[Jesse Vincent]

I suspect there's a way to make RT under modperl fail more gracefully. I'd support such a change. 

"Dominic Hargreaves" <dominic.hargreaves at oucs.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

>On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 11:38:32AM -0400, Jesse Vincent wrote:
>> That's going to become impossible as we continue to move RT's configuration into the database. I consider having your database around before application startup to be a fairly serious requirement. Parallel startup scripts don't have a way to declare dependencies? How do you deal with, say, starting up apps that are mounted on NFS filesystems?
>
>They do, but the problem is that I'm not in a position to mandate
>the dependencies declared by Apache, and it's not just RT that fails
>to start up but Apache in total, which may be used in other ways on the
>same system.
>
>There are network filesystem dependencies already included in the
>parallel startup stuff, I believe. But as pointed out already, there
>are some requirements you can't satisfy as easily: lack of a database
>server on a remote host being the obvious one, so even if there was
>sufficient information in the dependency information of the init
>scripts, that doesn't solve the underlying problem.
>
>I should have pointed out the short discussion on debian-devel on this
>matter, which was fairly strongly of the opinion that RT shouldn't
>break Apache in this way, and was also fairly negative about trying
>to persuade the Apache maintainers to add some dependencies so Apache
>will always start before the database servers:
>
>http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/08/msg00786.html
>and continuing:
>http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/09/msg00011.html
>
>If you think it's impossible to fix this in RT, then probably the
>only thing we can do is deprecate support for mod_perl, and suggest
>that people use FastCGI instead; because FastCGI doesn't turn fatal
>errors in the application into a fatal error to start the web server
>(certainly the Apache modules both seem to have a retry-with-backoff
>approach to the problem). Or maybe there's a mod_perl trick to do a
>similar thing which I'm not aware of.
>
>Cheers,
>Dominic.
>
>-- 
>Dominic Hargreaves, Systems Development and Support Team
>Computing Services, University of Oxford

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