Off you go… into the purple yonder!

So your mongrels are humming along happily and you have monit monitoring them with a definition like this:

check process mongrel_8010 with pidfile /path/to/current/log/mongrel.8010.pid
start program = “/usr/bin/mongrel_rails cluster::start -C /path/to/current/config/mongrel_cluster.yml –clean –only 8010″
stop program = “/usr/bin/mongrel_rails cluster::stop -C /path/to/current/config/mongrel_cluster.yml –clean –only 8010″

if failed host 127.0.0.1 port 8010
[...]

I have a monit config that tries to stop/start mongrel instances like this:

start program = “/usr/bin/mongrel_rails cluster::start -C path-to-mongrel_cluster.yml –clean –only PORT”
stop program = “/usr/bin/mongrel_rails cluster::stop -C path-to-mongrel_cluster.yml –clean –only PORT”

I have the latest mongrel_cluster gem installed (1.0.5), and yet mongrel_rails kept throwing errors about –clean and –only:

invalid option: –clean for [...]

Mongrel changes its user and group id to the user you specify when started as another user (say, root).
However, it does not change the environment variables from the user it was started as. In particular, ENV["USER"] and ENV["HOME"] remain set to, say, ‘root’ and ‘/root’ respectively.
If you then try to use the ruby gpgme wrappers [...]

So you’re writing a web-based application and you want journalling: when database records change, you want to keep track of the changes so that you have an audit trail. There are many ways to do this. If your application is going to be dealing with a lot of data, it’s best to have a separate [...]