PInetd2 is closing to release with the addition of two elements, a new launcher, and logs.
The new launcher is the first step toward the ability to dynamically start and stop subprocesses without restarting the whole daemon. The old “start.sh” has been replaced with a “daemonctl” tool, like in the old pinetd. This allows to start pinetd2 in the background (if forking is enabled), see processes status, and stop/restart the daemon directly. However since daemon can now be started in background, another feature was needed, which is…
Logging to a file
Of course, the whole system was made to centralize logs. Each child transmits logs via IPC to its parent, and the main launcher display logs on screen. It wasn’t difficult from there to write logs to a file. This means that even a FTP client chrooted somewhere can still send log events to its parent and get them written to the main logfile.
What’s next?
Now, I need to make those two elements less hack-like (ie. add some config options, add ability to log to syslog, etc), then I’ll have to finalize PMaild’s IMAP daemon thanks to the fact I added mailparse to the required elements in the PHP distribution. MailParse will handle the difficult mime-decoding part, and will make the next steps much easier. Parsed data will be cached in database (one new table per domain), and this should finally makes PMaild usable in imap-based webmails like Horde IMP.
