Running as a service... freeze

[Austin Griffith]

I'm kinda new but here's what i've got

i got camserv running great on my website
but i have to manually start it every reboot.
I know that i'm being dumb, but here was i did

i created a service S**camserv which started it on start) etc...

the only problem was that after the service started at boot... it would just freeze(right after it started) and i had to hard restart

is there a trick to video services or ... is there a better way to start it at boot?

thanks!
Austin Griffith

[Grant Swenson]

Yes, I have the same issues! (FreeBSD 4.5, camserv 0.5.1) I'm thinking about creating a startup script (ie, rc.d/camservcntl.sh) It would be handy to start and stop camserv like so:
camservcntl.sh stop
or
camservcntl.sh start
However, I have never written such a script before! I'm willing to give it a try, but another concern I would have is about running the service as root.  Hmm..I'll have to think about how to get around that one!
Anyway, if I do get something figured out, I'll post it here. I just wanted to let you know, Austin, I'm having the same problems!

[Andy McDuffie]

I am also trying to figure out a mod to camserv (which is awesome, BTW) to have it run at startup as a daemon in the background (and not as root).  I've tried just launching it from a script in init.d, but the camserv output commandeers the console and any remaining init scripts after camserv never launch.  I guess it really needs to be rewritten as a "real" server to use fork() to make the camserv process a child of init and exec() to put the process in the background.  It's been a long time since I studied client-server in C, but I'm going to take a crack at it, anyway.  I have an old intel P2 box running as our dedicated webcam server, so if I trash I don't really mind too much, but has anyone successfully been able to pull this off yet??

- Andy