[ubuntu-uk] Running daemon at startup as another user

[Rob Beard]

On 23/06/10 22:09, Simon Greenwood wrote:
>
>
> On 23 June 2010 21:45, Rob Beard <rob at esdelle.co.uk
> <mailto:rob at esdelle.co.uk>> wrote:
>
>     Hi folks,
>
>     I'm trying to setup Shoutcast on a VPS server for a mate of mine as a
>     favour.  The VPS server is running Ubuntu 8.04 AMD64.
>
>     Now I gather from reading up, it is recommended that the shoutcast
>     daemon is run as a user rather than root (presumably for security
>     purposes).
>
>     The thing is, I can't figure out how to do it.  At first I thought of
>     creating an init script, but presumably it'll run as root?
>
>     I also thought about cron, but I guess that would require me to enter a
>     start time (so if the server goes down say in the middle of the day then
>     it'll have to wait until the start time in the crontab?)
>
>     So I wondered if there was any way of running the shoutcast daemon as
>     another user basically from when the machine boots?
>
>
> You can set the user and group in the security stanza of the
> configuration file. You can then launch it from an init script and it
> should run as the user.
>
> Running it from cron is also valid, but you run a script every minute
> (or whatever interval you want) that checks for the pid file or running
> process and restarts the server if it can't find one or the other.
>
> Icecast is better documented and more actively supported than shoutcast
> on Linux - the old shoutcast documentation doesn't seem to exist anymore.
>
> s/
>

Thanks Simon and Neil,

I've used Icecast in the past, seems much better than Shoutcast as far 
as documentation goes.  I'm not sure why he specifically needs Shoutcast.

I don't suppose you know if Icecast is compatible with Shoutcast is it? 
  (I mean for streaming to the server, at the moment I'm using Winamp 
with the Shoutcast DSP plugin to send the audio to the server and then 
the Gnome Movie Player app to play the stream).

Rob