Start on boot, Linux

[Lucifer]

Maybe I'm just dumb, but how the hell do you get armagetronad-dedicated to start on boot under Linux? Mandrake 10, in fact.

My computer's always running, thought I'd host a server that'll pretty much always be on...

Thanks,

[ishAdmin]

You can edit /etc/rc.local as root and put your commands in there. I don't know if mandrake has an easy graphical way to do this.

[Lucifer]

Mmm, I looked in there and didn't find quite what I was looking for.

I wound up copying some boilerplate init.d script for Mandrake 9.1 and adding the commands to it to make armagetronad work, with a pretty important caveat. Armagetronad, running in the --daemon mode, doesn't properly detach from the shell, so I had to stick a & on the end of the command line. ;( Not happy about that because it doesn't report whether or not it started properly right now, since the Mandrake init.d scripts check the return code of the process, and if the process detached properly the return code should indicate that the daemon started successfully. I might try working up a workaround (shouldn't be that hard), but it would be better if this was fixed in ArmagetronAd, since that's technically where the bug is. (No idea what's involved in doing this, though)

[ishAdmin]

I think it's typical for a service to write it's pid's to a file for easy reference, should you wish to check to see if it running for instance. Do you need anything more fancy than that?

[/dev/null]

Another possible task if you feel up to it would e to modify eggdrops autobotchk scrip to work for armagetron.
then it would be in the cron and if it crashes would automatically restart.
Another thing to note is if your hostname is nonresolvable both the normal and dedicated servers will segfault. Its an old bug in the engine armagetron uses.