I've been playing a lot recently with Mono 2.10.5 with .NET 4 and MVC 3 with razor views. I am now hosting my website with nginx and fastcgi-mono-server4 configured. Although the website is still not known to public (and will not be until it reaches a desirable state), we've been testing it for many days and things seem to run just fine so far.
So, given the context, let's go the questions that drive me insane some times:
- Can I update the contents of my website (dll's, for instance) without having to restart the fastcgi process safely? Is there a possibility of momentaneous failure for my visitors when I'm doing that?
- How can I gracefully stop fastcgi-mono-server? I took the initialization script from http://yojimbo87.github.com/2010/03/14/mono-startup-script.html as basis, but it just kills (sends SIGTERM) the fastcgi-mono-server process, not calling Application_End in Global.asax (and that is what I mean by ungraceful shutdown). SIGHUP won't work either (though it also kills the server)
Also, I can't find a page to follow the news or the state of mono-fastcgi-server, the only references I have taught me how to set up the server and the basic workings of it, but I have NO IDEA where to look for new versions and changelogs (or even a download page, so far I've been using portage to install the xsp package, which comes with fastcgi-mono-server). I found http://kerrick.wordpress.com/2007/08/ but the last post on fastcgi-mono-server is so old that it scares me.
If I may ask one last question, how can I run fastcgi-mono-server as an unprivileged user? I'm afraid to try to setuid the process, since I'm not quite sure if mono will respect the setuid flag (haven't tried it yet) and most important, I'm not sure whether fastcgi-mono-server needs root access at some point to set things. I'm deeply inclined to try something along this line, but since I can't find any docs on the matter, I haven't done anything yet. Obviously, I'm quite desperate, since the server is running as root!!
Thank you in advance!