Questions[background](server)

We want everyone on the Windows Domain to have the same desktop background. This is set up in a Group Policy. This works great in Windows XP but the Windows 7 machines display a black background.

I have re-created the Group Policy, done various tests with different types and sizes of files Enabling and Disabling Active Desktop. I have researched and tried some options and patches from Microsoft as well.

Any idea what I can try or even how to determine the problem?

Disclaimer: I'm totally new to shell scripting, but have quite a bit of experience in other languages like PHP and Obj-C.

I'm writing my first daemon script. Here are the goals:

• I want it to run in the background
• I want it to be triggered by an init.d script that includes start/stop/restart commands
• I want each process in a loop to trigger its own subprocess.
• When the parent process kicked off by the init.d script is killed, I want the subprocesses to die as well.

Essentially, I'm looking for the same kind of behavior that appears to be very common among software like apache, spamd, dovecot, etc. But, based on my research, I haven't found a single, simple answer as to how this kind of thing is achieved.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

I need to run SSH commands remotely with the output displaying locally. But if the connection breaks I want the command to still run.

I am not talking so much about logging in and executing but doing ssh user@remotehost 'commands && command etc'

How can I ensure the command runs even if the connection breaks?

I have a Sinatra app which I run on my local machine using ruby app.rb. While deploying it on a remote machine via ssh, how do I run it in background and redirect stdout and stderr to a log file?

On a restart, I want to preserve the previous logs so that newer messages are appended to the existing log file, instead of truncating it.

What's the recommended way of running my web application as a daemon?

I've tried nohup ruby app.rb &, but that seems to be missing stderr and the log statements seem to be out of order in some cases.

Asking this after a prolonged discussion with a coworker, I'd really like a clarification here.

I launch a background process, either by appending "&" to the command line or by stopping it with CTRL-Z and resuming it in background with "bg". Then I log out.

What happens?

We were quite sure it should have been killed by a SIGHUP, but this didn't happen; upon logging in again, the process was happily running and pstree showed it was "adopted" by init.

Is this the expected behaviour?

But then, if it is, what's the nohup command's purpose? It just looks like the process isn't going to be killed anyway, with or without it...

Edit 1

Some more details:

• The command was launched from a SSH session, not from the physical console.
• The command was launched without nohup and/or &; it was then suspended with CTRL-Z and resumed in background with bg.
• The ssh session did not drop. There was an actual logout ("exit" command).
• The process was a scp file copy operation.
• Upon logging in again, pstree showed the process running and being child of init.

Edit 2

To state the question more clearly: will putting a process in background (using & or bg) make it ignore SIGHUP, just like the nohup command does?

Edit 3

I tried manually sending a SIGHUP to scp: it exited, so it definitely doesn't ignore the signal.

Then I tried again launching it, putting it in the background and logging off: it got "adopted" by init and kept running, and I found it there when logging back on.

I'm quite puzzled now. Looks like no SIGHUP was sent at all upong logging off.