Alfarady Blog

General Information: This should be useful to about 100 people or maybe just one person. The Valve script hlds_run monitors the exit status of hlds. If the server crashes or you send an rcon quit hlds_run will restart the game server. What can you do when hlds does not crash it freezes with a segmentation fault? A watchdog timer - to ping hlds from time to time, when there is no reply kill the hung process. Let hlds_run restart hlds.

edit: some people like to use tmux for multiple virtual displays and they say it is better than screen.
Linux script to monitor and restart frozen game servers. Install the dedicated server files and the mod. Plus qstat, lsof and screen for mutiple virtual displays.
Some good information on writing a script in Linux to restart frozen game servers using qstat can be viewed here: http://forums.steampowered.com/forum....php?t=1379885
The author provides a link to another script that uses qstat. It is translated from German to English, I found that the script syntax on the original German page works.
original full text here: http://sourceserver.info/wiki/tutori...response_check

Overall a fairly elegant solution using qstat, lsof and a list of servers to check, I assume hlds_run was used to launch the game servers before running this script as a cron job. watchdog.sh

#!/bin/bash

function init {
       if [ -z "`which lsof`" ]; then echo "lsof isn't installed"; return 1; fi
       if [ ! -f ~/qstat ]; then echo "qstat isn't installed"; return 1; fi
       if [ ! -f ~/watchdog_servers ]; then echo "~/watchdog_servers
doesn't exists"; return 1; fi
       return 0
}

function not_response {
       ~/qstat -a2s $1 -nh -timeout 20 | egrep -q 'no response|DOWN'
}

function get_pid {
       lsof -i 4udp@${1} | cut -d ' ' -f2 | tail -n 1
}

function parse_list {
       cat ~/watchdog_servers | tr -d \r
}

function kill_dead_server {
       echo -en "Testing -> $1\t\t\t"
       if not_response $1; then
               pid=`get_pid $1`
               [[ -z "$pid" ]] && echo "[Not Running]"
               [[ ! -z "$pid" ]] && kill $pid && echo "[Restarted]"
       else
       echo "[OK]"
       fi
}

init || exit
for server in `parse_list`; do
       kill_dead_server $server
done