Fnord on Gentoo Linux

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Any information on this page may be outdated or otherwise inaccurate. Links may be broken. It stays here for historical reasons.

Content

I wrote this small documentation because Frank wasn’t able to get fnord running. It describes how to get fnord running on Gentoo Linux.

Installation

fnord needs the daemontools and ucspi-tcp from Daniel J. Bernstein. To emerge fnord, ucspi-tcp and the daemontools, execute the following command:

emerge daemontools ucspi-tcp fnord

Configuration

daemontools

daemontools include a programm called svscan. To load it at boot, execute the following command to add it to the default-runlevel:

rc-update add svscan default

The Ebuild for the daemontools created a directory /service/, where svscan now watches for changes. We’ll use it later.

fnord

The configuration of fnord is a bit… different. Even if there’s enough documentation around, I would describe it again, because it was the reason to write this article.

svscan requires a directory for each service it should watch. I likely create them in /var/, but /etc/ is also a used place sometimes. For most services who are tought to be used together with svscan, there is a *-conf-program. For fnord it’s being called fnord-conf. We use it to create our initial configuration:

mkdir /var/www
    fnord-conf fnord fnordlog /var/fnord /var/www

This will create a empty directory /var/www and another one, /var/fnord, with the startscripts for fnord.

Publishing content

fnord supports a very easy feature for virtual hosts. But because we want it to have simple, we only create one default-host:

mkdir /var/www/default

To put something there, just copy it to /var/www/default.

Starting fnord

Because fnord uses svscan, it is very easy to get it to start. Just create a symlink to it in /service:

ln -s /var/fnord /service/fnord

Within 5 seconds, svscan should start the new installed fnord. You can reach afterwards using http://localhost/.

Other things

Maintaining fnord

Start fnord:
svc -u /service/fnord
Stop fnord:
svc -d /service/fnord
Restart fnord:
svc -du /service/fnord
Check if it’s running:
svstat /service/fnord

Let it listen on another port

Edit /var/fnord/run and change port 80 to something else. After doing that, restart fnord.

Other pages related to fnord

Fefe’s pages on fnord
http://www.fefe.de/fnord/
fnord HOWTO
http://www.fbunet.de/fnord.shtml
fnord mini HOWTO (also with SSL)
http://projectdream.org/publications/fnord.html