Restarting geth node, doesn't work properly with cron nor Ubuntu upstart service

My geth node fails once in a day or so. Tried everything, but still keeps failing.

Geth 1.6.1 hangs throwing "unexpected fault address" fatal error

Upgraded geth to last version, rebuilt chain from scratch, but keeps failing once in a day.

So a restarting system was needed in order to keep the node up & running.

First try was creating a cron entry like this:

*/1 * * * * /home/my_local_username/ethereum/launch.sh

that checks whether geth is running or not. If not, it launchs geth again:

!/bin/sh

env – cat /home/my_local_username/my_env.sh /bin/sh

ps auxw | grep geth | grep -v grep > /dev/null

if [ $? != 0 ] then
/home/my_local_username/ethereum/geth –testnet –rpc –rpcapi "db,eth,net,web3,personal" –rpcport "8545" –mine –etherbase
"0x8c6…" –gasprice "1000000000" –bootnodes "enode://20c…" 2>
/home/my_local_username/ethereum/nohup.out fi

The environment file /home/my_local_username/my_env.sh was created using this command:

env > /home/my_local_username/my_env.sh

This way, when geth fails it starts over after 1 minute as much. And it works and it mines, but not properly. I mean, when geth is relaunched with the cron it has a weird behaviour. It doesn´t let me open a terminal like this:

$ ./geth –testnet attach
ipc:/home/my_local_username/.ethereum/testnet/geth.ipc

It fails with the error:

Fatal: Unable to attach to remote geth: dial unix
/home/my_local_username/.ethereum/testnet/geth.ipc: connect:
connection refused

And when sending commands through the JSON-RPC link, it fails too with the error:

Unknown account

When launching geth manually from a shell terminal, those two things work properly. When relauched from cron, they don't.

Second try was creating a service on Ubuntu for geth, as explained at https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/2249/2426

The result, the same weird behaviour: unable to connect to geth through terminal and unknown account error when sending commands through JSON-RPC port.

This is the log from geth when starting as a cron process:

INFO [09-14|08:20:02] Starting peer-to-peer node               instance=Geth/v1.6.5-stable-cf87713d/linux-amd64/go1.8.3
INFO [09-14|08:20:02] Allocated cache and file handles         database=/home/bitnami/.ethereum/testnet/geth/chaindata cache=128 handles=1024
INFO [09-14|08:20:06] Initialised chain configuration          config="{ChainID: 3 Homestead: 0 DAO: <nil> DAOSupport: true EIP150: 0 EIP155: 10 EIP158: 10 Metropolis: 9223372036854775807 Engine: ethash}"
INFO [09-14|08:20:06] Disk storage enabled for ethash caches   dir=/home/bitnami/.ethereum/testnet/geth/ethash count=3
INFO [09-14|08:20:06] Disk storage enabled for ethash DAGs     dir=/home/bitnami/.ethash                       count=2
INFO [09-14|08:20:06] Initialising Ethereum protocol           versions="[63 62]" network=3
INFO [09-14|08:20:06] Loaded most recent local header          number=1658958 hash=2eacdb…cdfa00 td=1833602778380180
INFO [09-14|08:20:06] Loaded most recent local full block      number=1658958 hash=2eacdb…cdfa00 td=1833602778380180
INFO [09-14|08:20:06] Loaded most recent local fast block      number=1658958 hash=2eacdb…cdfa00 td=1833602778380180
WARN [09-14|08:20:07] Blockchain not empty, fast sync disabled 
INFO [09-14|08:20:07] Starting P2P networking 
INFO [09-14|08:20:10] UDP listener up                          self=enode://d01d74c3b76f6bcf57c548d36b977b49745328566e2a12c00dded0b4ad0970518a5615cde8fd833f8f2a93b35482cf373479baf8e0c634b44123d6c8067a2615@[::]:30303
INFO [09-14|08:20:10] RLPx listener up                         self=enode://d01d74c3b76f6bcf57c548d36b977b49745328566e2a12c00dded0b4ad0970518a5615cde8fd833f8f2a93b35482cf373479baf8e0c634b44123d6c8067a2615@[::]:30303
INFO [09-14|08:20:10] IPC endpoint opened: /home/bitnami/.ethereum/testnet/geth.ipc 
INFO [09-14|08:20:10] HTTP endpoint opened: http://127.0.0.1:8545 
INFO [09-14|08:20:10] Starting mining operation 
INFO [09-14|08:20:11] Commit new mining work                   number=1658959 txs=0 uncles=0 elapsed=424.726ms
INFO [09-14|08:24:21] Block synchronisation started 
INFO [09-14|08:24:21] Mining aborted due to sync 
INFO [09-14|08:24:32] Imported new chain segment               blocks=1 txs=10 mgas=1.612 elapsed=10.313s   mgasps=0.156 number=1658959 hash=5b879b…1d974e

I am quite puzzled about all these errors. Any hint on it will be very helpful for me. Thx!

Refs:

Restart Geth from another process