More, and nastier, upstart problems

So I thought the symlink issue was worth posting about.

Well until this happened. The job is stopped so it cannot be stopped, it cannot be started since it still has a process it is tracking and it is not in the waiting state. And so on.

# initctl status xcmon
xcmon stop/killed, process 1175

For the full gory and glory:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/406397

Luckily someone posted something useful in that thread full of "5 years from now"

https://raw.github.com/ion1/workaround-upstart-snafu/master/workaround-upstart-snafu

# ./workaround-upstart-snafu 1175

You may want to change the first line to look for plain ruby instead of ruby1.8 (on my system it is 1.8 anyway). Then run and wait until process IDs loop around.

# ./workaround-upstart-snafu 1175
                1175

# initctl status xcmon
xcmon stop/waiting

Now you can fix this job's conf and start again. Assuming you can.