The problem with PID files is that while you can use a PID to verifythat your daemon isn't running, you can't use it alone to verify thatyour daemon is in fact present. You have to use other mechanisms, liketrying to communicate with it, to verify that whatever has the PIDactually is your daemon, instead of something that has inherited thePID.

Most of the time the risk that people think about with this is PIDrollover: your daemon dies, the system churns through tens

One of my little peculiarities is that I use a quite custom environment,one that comes nowhere near a graphical login program, much less Gnome orKDE. One of the consequences of this is that I get to set up by hand anumber of things that a normal environment runs automatically, like volume management .

These custom things keep changing themselves as I move from versionto version of Fedora, so here is what I had to do to get my environmentrunning nicely under Fedora 8:

• If you start your X session

Recently (for my version of recently), some pundits have askedwhy people are willing to accept the sometimes less than stellaruptimes that they get from your typical internet service. (Okay,the original article applied the question to various other services too.)

My view is that it's pretty simple and really comes down to two things:

• people are not willing to abandon flawed services, because flawedservices are generally better than nothing.
• people are also not willing to pay the price of carrier grade uptimes,because