Moving on, or jumping around?

< Amazon Web Service | Time Management >

Nov 6

Moving on, or jumping around?

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Well, I've skipped the Amazon Web Services stint for a little while...probably for quite a while in all actuality. I come to find out that the libraries in our library system (we have like 60+ of them so I hear) don't all have correct ISBN information associated with the books; our own library is also culprit. Anything, anything outside of our PAC (Public Access Catalog, the web-based catalog) uses ISBNs as the unique identifier of a book. How in the heck can I mashup anything about the books without a unique identifier that is valuable to everyone? I can't think of anything, so after I got my Amazon S3 key and perused the documentation over for about 10 minutes just to get acquainted, I haven't touched it... It's sad, realy.

Anyway, now I'm back on track to trying to get our Macintosh OSX G5 Server (it's a true-blue -well, silvery white actually- blade server from Apple) working as it should be. I thought Apache would need to be started in the StartupItems control. I've since learned about launchd. I'm reading contradicting information about launchd. One camp says not to use launchd to handle daemons, other camps suggest to use it for daemons but don't actually go into any examples. I can't find any plist file examples that show the httpd process associated with launchd. Anyone have any examples, experience, or anything else? HELP!

If I find anything out later on, I'll try to remember to give an update.

UPDATE: (Nov 7, 2006)

Well, I found an example of someone using launchd to automate the startup process of Apache. He seemed to do a good job of it, but I read a bit more (and had help -- thanks Stephen) and came to the realization that using launchd to handle Apache, which has evolved so much to pretty much handle itself by itself. The httpd daemon may need to create child processes at runtime (which launchd disallows), and Apple themselves don't use launchd to run Apache, and they'd like to eventually use launchd to replace everything. launchd is PID 1, meaning it's the process that handles all other successive processes. If launchd crashes, the entire system is beyond unstable, it's DOA. So, if Apache isn't running on launchd by default on a Mac OSX Server install setup straight from Apple, I'd have to strongly assume that although it can be done, it probably shouldn't. I'M DISAGREEING WITH MY MORE INTELLIGENT COWORKER! I AIN'T DOIN' IT THIS WAY!