Is it possible for me to spin off my own thread to do background work separate from individual requests in a module? I am trying to start a thread from the instantiate call and then rejoin on the detach, this seems to work when I run radius -X, but something is happening when radius is not in debug so that it gets stuck or killed somehow, the log statement is only logged once. All I have is a while loop with a log and sleep statement in it as shown below. It is not getting stuck in the log call as even without that, sending a sigterm to the process still hangs. #include <freeradius/ident.h> RCSID("$Id$") #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <pthread.h> #include <freeradius-devel/radiusd.h> #include <freeradius-devel/modules.h> typedef struct rlm_gwis_t { int shutdown; pthread_t p_thread; } gw_config; const CONF_PARSER module_config[] = { { NULL, -1, 0, NULL, NULL } /* end the list */ }; void *gwis__background__start(void *data) { gw_config *gwd = data; if(!gwd) return NULL; while(!gwd->shutdown) { radlog(L_ERR, "Background process, shutdown %d", gwd->shutdown); sleep(1); } return NULL; } static int gwis_detach(void *gwd) { if(gwd) { ((gw_config *)gwd)->shutdown = 1; pthread_join(((gw_config *)gwd)->p_thread, NULL); free(gwd); } return RLM_MODULE_OK; } static int gwis_instantiate(CONF_SECTION *conf, void **gwd) { gw_config *tmp_gwd; tmp_gwd = rad_malloc(sizeof(gw_config)); if(!tmp_gwd) { return RLM_MODULE_FAIL; } memset(tmp_gwd, 0, sizeof(gw_config)); if(cf_section_parse(conf, tmp_gwd, module_config) < 0) { free(tmp_gwd); return RLM_MODULE_FAIL; } tmp_gwd->shutdown = 0; if(pthread_create(&tmp_gwd->p_thread, NULL, gwis__background__start, tmp_gwd)) { gwis_detach(tmp_gwd); return -1; } *gwd = tmp_gwd; return RLM_MODULE_OK; } static int gwis_preacct(void *gwd, REQUEST *request) { return RLM_MODULE_OK; } module_t rlm_gwis = { RLM_MODULE_INIT, "gwis", RLM_TYPE_THREAD_SAFE, gwis_instantiate, gwis_detach, { NULL, NULL, gwis_preacct, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL }, };