[MUD-Dev] Re: [IDEAS] Starting from scratch

[s001gmu at nova.wright.edu]

On Thu, 6 Aug 1998, Ross Nicoll wrote:

[...]

> Reminds me of a thought I had for my MUD. The MUD, whenever we change anything
> in the code (it's a Diku style MUD, most of the stuff is in code), obviously
> has to go through a reboot. I was wandering about having the data for
> connections written out with the database (with sanity checking on load, of
> course, incase something goes wrong after the database is saved), then have
> the server load the new binary over itself with one of the exec() functions.
> 
> The player would get "The server is rebooting, please wait" or similar...

I know of a couple of EoD derivatives that have a 'soft-boot'.  They just
recompile, then do a fork/exec.  I imagine there are some more details to
it (like making sure there are no other open files, etc), but the imps I
talked to about it said it was a pretty straight forward change.  I recall
a figure of 'an afternoon's work' being quoted.  *shrug*

I believe they also tied that in with the crash-recovery.  In case of a
seg fault they catch the signal and do a gracefull soft-boot.  I dunno
if they put a counter/timer in it, to catch things like loading a certain
p-file causing the seg-fault (which would send the server into a lovely
infinite reboot cycle).

-Greg