From the "Weichet von mir Dämonen!" department here is a little helper i found for the would-be ruby savvy system adminstraters. The Daemons ruby gem by Thomas Uehlinger is a very welcomed replacment for the shell and perl scripting mess you do for half of the day.

Daemons provides: .... scripts  to be run as a daemon and to be controlled by simple start/stop/restart commands.

... run blocks of ruby code and control these processes from the main application.

...offers many advanced features like exception backtracing and logging and monitoring

...and automatic restarting of your processes if they crash.

I spread the word here as part of my ruby evangelizing efforts to bring light into your scripting hell and as maybe your first step onto the path of ruby enlightenment.

have fun