TEAGLU
TimeoutD
Timeoutd is a simple daemon to call a notification script based on UDP keep-alive messages.
Say you have a background process (or cron job) which is supposed to wake up every 5 seconds and process pending messages. That process might crash because of some unexpected data, because the database drive is full, or because the linux "OOM Killer" picks your process to kill.
To use timeoutd, you change your process to send a UDP packet when messages are successfully processed. The packet is just a key and a number of seconds, like "mq.proc:15".
If the timeoutd daemon doesn't receive another packet for "mq.proc" within 15 seconds, it calls its notification script. That script can send a text or an email, or whatever else you want it to do.
There are always ways to fail you don't think of, so trying to catch them all is a never-ending struggle. Using timeoutd allows you to catch "the absence of success".
