[Slad] Making the SLAD installation routine robust?

[Dirk Jagdmann]

Jan-Oliver Wagner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> since I experienced some situation where the SLADinstallation process hangs
> and you need to kill SLADinstaller, I wonder whether it is possible
> to make the SLAD installation routine return with an error _always_ when
> there is _some_ problem.
> 
> I am asking this quetion for the general case because it is virtually
> impossible to consider any possible problem in advance. The routine
> will simply fail if conditions are bad enough. I can live with this, but
> it would be absolutely cool if any type of failure or hanging could be detected
> and reported back. Any chance for this?

How should this be done? To install something on the remote machine 
sladinstaller opens a shell based ssh connection and then executes some 
shell scripts on the remote host. Since the actual program running on 
the remote host is hidden by the remote shell and the ssh connection, 
sladinstaller has no way to figure out the status of the running process 
on the remote machine.

A hack would be to use a program like "timeout" so simply kill the 
installation script after a certain time. But how do you define this 
time? Or you generally would have to answer the question how to detect 
if an arbitrary program is hanging/crashed?

-- 
Dirk Jagdmann <d.jagdmann at dn-systems.de> : Coder
Tel. +49-5121-28989-15
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