Application crashes only when launched from inittab on busybox

Question

I'm writing an application for an embedded busybox system that allows TCP connections, then sends out messages to all connected clients. It works perfectly when I telnet to the box and run the application from a shell prompt, but I have problems when it is launched from the inittab. It will launch and I can connect to the application with one client. It successfully sends one message out to that client, then crashes. It will also crash if I connect a second client before any messages are sent out. Again, everything works perfectly if I launch it from a shell prompt instead.

The following errors are what comes up in the log:

<11>Jan  1 00:02:49 tmmpd.bin: ERROR: recvMessage failed, recv IO error 
<11>Jan  1 00:02:49 tmmpd.bin: Some other LTK TCP error 103. Closing connection 10 
<11>Jan  1 00:02:49 tmmpd.bin: ERROR: recvMessage failed, recv IO error 
<11>Jan  1 00:02:49 tmmpd.bin: Some other LTK TCP error 103. Closing connection 10 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I was testing a bit in arm-qemu and busybox, and I was able to start a script as user test to run in background.

I have created a new user "test":

buildroot-dir> cat etc/passwd
test:x:1000:1000:Linux User,,,:/home/test:/bin/sh

Created a simple testscript.sh:

target_system> cat /home/test/testscript.sh
#!/bin/sh

while :
do
    echo "still executing in bg"
    sleep 10
done

To my /etc/init.d/rcS I added a startup command for it:

#!/bin/sh
mount -t proc none /proc
mount -t sysfs none /sys
/sbin/mdev -s

/bin/su test -c /home/test/testscript.sh& # < Added this

Now when I start the system, the script will run in the background, and when I grep for the process it has been started as user test (default root user is just 0):

target_system> ps aux | grep testscript
496 test    0:00 sh -c home/test/testscript.sh
507 test    0:00 {testscript.sh} /bin/sh home/test/testscript.sh