[Linux-disciples] 'zap'

[Stephen R Laniel]

This pisses me off: under Gentoo, I was getting some weird
behavior with mysqld. If I did /etc/init.d/mysql stop,
Gentoo would give me a little icon indicating that it
couldn't stop for some reason. There was a good explanation:
mysql wasn't running. If I did a 'ps aux', mysql wasn't in
the list. If I looked for pid or socket files in
/var/run/mysqld, there were none. Okay, so then I'd try to
start mysqld: 'sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start'. That didn't
work: I'd get a warning saying that mysqld was already
running -- which it wasn't.

So I couldn't start it, and I couldn't stop it. I googled a
bit and found
http://www.linode.com/forums/archive/o_t/t_1462/mysql_crashing_something_to_do_with_crond_.html

which says that you can do

/etc/init.d/mysql zap

to forcibly put mysql in a stopped state. I did that, then
did a 'mysql start', and it started fine.

That really irritates me. A daemon should stop when you tell
it to stop; there shouldn't be a second verb for 'no,
seriously, stop.'

I thought I'd pass this along, just in case anyone else
finds that mysql is in some no-man's land between started
and stopped. Turns out that 'zap' is a verb that applies to
daemons in gentoo other than just mysql:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=2&chap=4

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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