Running perforce p4d as service on RHEL

Perforce is not providing standard script to run the perforce server p4d as service on Linux systems. Different people configured it in different way. Here is my way of running it as service on RHEL machines.

• Create an account 'perforce' in your machine
• Download p4d and place it in designated directory as defined P4ROOT. Provide exec permission for it. And also change the owner to 'perforce' account.

         In my case P4ROOT=/home/perforce/server

• Create a start-up script 'p4d' at /etc/init.d

cat /etc/init.d/p4d
#!/bin/sh
# description: This is a daemon which starts perforce server on reboot
PATH=/sbin:/bin

test -f /home/perforce/server/p4d || exit 0
export P4ROOT=/home/perforce/server
export P4PORT=1818
RUN_AS_USER=perforce

case "$1" in
start)
  su -m $RUN_AS_USER -c "/home/perforce/server/p4d -r $P4ROOT -J /home/perforce/logs/journal -L /home/perforce/logs/p4err -p tcp:$P4PORT &"
  ;;
stop)
  /usr/local/bin/p4 admin stop
  ;;
*)
  echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/p4proxy {start|stop}"
  exit 1
esac

exit 0

Here note that we are not running p4d as root, instead using the account 'perforce'

• Add a new service for management through chkconfig

          chkconfig --add p4d

• Configure the run levels on which it needs to be on

          chkconfig --levels 345 p4d on

        It creates soft-links like

           ls -ltr /etc/rc3.d/S29p4d

        lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Sep  4 16:36 /etc/rc3.d/S29p4d -> ../init.d/p4d

• Verify it by running commands

            service p4d start

            service p4d stop

Read More

Using wget to download files recursively from https site

wget is a command used mostly in Linux to download files from web links (http, https or ftp). To download a file, a simple invocation of wget like
  wget http://mylibrary.com/build-kits/rel-2.7.1/prod1/prod1-2.7.1.10.tar
will download prod1-2.7.1.10.tar to the current directory.

To download set of files (ex .tar files) from a secured https site, we need to provide several options to it
  wget --no-check-certificate -r -l1 --no-parent -A.tar http://mylibrary.com/build-kits/rel-2.7.1/prod1/
where
  --no-check-certificate: don't validate the server's certificate
  -r or --recursive: specify recursive download
  -l1 or --level=NUMBER: maximum recursion depth (inf or 0 for infinite).
 --no-parent: don't ascend to the parent directory
 -A or --accept=LIST:  comma-separated list of accepted extensions.
 -nd or --no-directories: don't create directories.

Read More