[Pdns-users] guardian config/init discrepancy?

[Christopher Wood]

ut of nosiness, why is the guardian process configured in the init script though not in the config file?

In pdns-3.0/pdns/pdns.conf-dist:

# guardian=no

In pdns-3.0/pdns/pdns.in:

$pdns_server --daemon --guardian=yes

Documentation:

http://doc.powerdns.com/guardian.html


Background:

I ran into this while inspecting the results of letting a chaos monkey loose in my powerdns lab. One of the problems I'm encountering is that if the monkey does a kill -9 on the guardian process, something like monit will attempt to restart powerdns indefinitely. Eventually there will be a number of guardian processes attempting to spawn an instance, but they can't because an instance is already bound to port 53.

My own solution to this is likely to avoid having a guardian process, but then I have something which will restart pdns_server if it's killed. This seems like a case of "who guards the guardian", with the caveat that there's no way of reconfiguring this that will tell a package manager not to overwrite the init script on package changes.