[Babel-users] Running Babel at startup

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

> "/usr/local/bin/babeld wlan0 -D".

That should be

  babeld -D wlan0

The command-line above causes babeld to listen for interfaces called
"wlan0" and "-D", but not daemonise itself.  The fact that babeld
doesn't daemonise probably interacts in weird and wonderful ways with
your init scripts.

(The fact that there's no interface called "-D" is immaterial -- Babel
will patiently wait until such an interface appears.  That's an
important feature for people running Babel over VPNs, which may come and
go at any time.)

I've put a slightly modified (and untested) version of an init script
for Debian on

  http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/files/babeld.init

It is due to Julien Cristau and myself (you owe us a beer each).

                                        Juliusz

P.S. Offtopic rant.  Including daemonisation code in every single binary
     is stupid.  The proper way, of course, is to have init spawn your
     daemons and take care of both their life and death cycle and logging.

     Proper implementations of that have existed for decades -- VMS
     services, Windows NT services, daemontools, runit, and I'm sure
     plenty others.  But distribution vendors prefer the complexitiy and
     unreliability of SystemV init.

     For some reason, Ubuntu, who usually tend to be reasonable people,
     decided to eschew the use of runit and design their own instead.
     Almost four years later, upstart still can't do logging properly,
     but it has this wonderful events system that few understand and
     nobody uses.

     I guess runit was too useable.