By setting the environment variable LOCALBASE and the make variable "prefix", the install of ser can be *almost* completely in user disk space. The exception I encountered is in serctl and sc scripts. They have lines like PID_FILE=/var/run/ser.pid which is out of bounds for a /home user.

Perhaps this value could be read from the ser.cfg file. Alternatively an environment variable like SER_PID_FILE could introduced and PID_FILE could pick it up if set.

Also "serctl restart" fails on an error if ser is not running. The way others servers, eg apache, work is for restart to mean "if (alive) kill; start". That way the end point of "restart" is always a running server with a newly read configuration or a server that failed to start because of configuration failure. It does not depend upon the previous state. The combination "stop" followed by "start" already gives you a version of "restart" that fails on error if the server is not up.

By running ser directly both problems can be worked around.

John.