#2 add process renaming functionality

[johnnnnnnn]

Create a new configuration directive that takes a string, to be the monitored process' name.

[Jeremy Fincher]

John: can you confirm whether your deployment Python version has access to the "ctypes' module?

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Yep. The only scenarios in which we're using finitd are python >=2.6.

[Jeremy Fincher]

Based on what I can find, I can do a *partial* rename using ctypes, but to do a full rename requires a C module, e.g., http://code.google.com/p/procname/ , which is written fairly poorly but should work. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/564695/is-there-a-way-to-change-effective-process-name-in-python for more details.

[johnnnnnnn]

Presumably by a "partial" rename you mean a prctl rename, right? I have to think that the strcpy method would be doable using ctypes, too.

[Jeremy Fincher]

Yeah, I can call prctl through ctypes, but I can't modify argv[0] through ctypes. According to the SO link, it seems that the latter is necessary for some forms of `ps` to display the new name.

[johnnnnnnn]

I spent a little time poking around with this. I haven't found a solution, but i'm fairly convinced one exists, using ctypes to call functions in Python.h.

You should be able to get a reference to argv from Py_GetArgcArgv, and pass that through to strcpy (or a variant).