How to restart Jetty in Sentinel 7 without restarting Sentinel

  • 7009733
  • 11-Nov-2011
  • 26-Apr-2012

Environment

Sentinel 7
Jetty

Situation

If Jetty gets in a bad state, the only way to reset it is by stopping Sentinel since the web server is embedded. 

Although we have never confirmed that jetty ever gets in a bad state, it would be nice to at least have the option of restarting it without affecting the rest of Sentinel.

Resolution

Before a restart is attempted, everyone should logout of the system and close their browsers.
To restart the embedded Jetty simply create a file ${esecurity.data.home}/data/jetty.restart.trigger with write permissions for the novell user.

Every 30 seconds, it will check to see if the file exists.
If it does and it can be deleted, Jetty will restart itself after the file is deleted (to prevent repeated restarts).

Additional Information

The point of this enhancement is to have a way to try to restart jetty during some fatal system state. There is no guarantee this can be done cleanly, especially if users are logged into the system, so this restart option should be viewed as a last resort that is not guaranteed to work.