LinLog

Here's a little problem I ran across at work the other day. I was writing a little script to SSH into our 2 app servers and restart Memcached. Simple and easy, right?

Well, not quite. When I ran the script, the restart was hanging the SSH session. The service restarted properly, but my SSH connection never closed, so the script couldn't move on to the second server. What the heck?!?

Turns out that this is an issue with the way OpenSSH handles I/O streams. Apparently the init script for starting memcached didn't close standard output, so OpenSSH stuck around waiting for it. The solution: redirect STDOUT and STDERR on the server to /dev/null. That closes the streams and keeps the session from hanging. Of course, that could be a problem if you actually need to see any of the output, but in this case, I didn't.