Stochastic Geometry

Sometimes, $DAYJOB can get kindof technical. For reasons I won’t go into here because NDA, the following axioms are true for this puzzle:

• we have to work in JRuby
• we are in a plugin within a larger framework providing a service
• we have to restart the entire service
• we don’t have a programmatic way to do so
• we don’t want to rely on external artifacts and cron

Now, this isn’t the initial framing set of axioms you understand; this is what we’re facing into after a few weeks of trying everything else first.

So; obvious solution, system('/etc/init.d/ourService restart').
Except that JRuby doesn’t do system(). Or fork(), exec(), daemon(), or indeed any kind of process duplication I could find. Oh-kay, so we can write to a file, have a cronjob watch for the file and restart the service and delete the file if it finds it.… Read the rest