Major Problem with Apache 1.2b7 (fwd)

[Rob Hartill <ro...@imdb.com>]

Another linux luser.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 15:26:01 -0500
From: Joseph Possert <jo...@voltec.com>
To: apache-bugs@apache.org
Subject: Major Problem with Apache 1.2b7

Hello,

	I have what is a really big problem with the Apached HTTP server.  
While the server works 95% of the time great it has a major 
interaction problem.  There are 2 problems.  The first is that the 
server will 'hang' for a few seconds.  This is a documented bug, 
however, I don't have a 'heavily' used server by any stretch of the 
imagination.  The second bug I can attribute to Apache because it 
only shows up when Apache is running or has run since the last 
shutdown.  If I run Apache on my Linux box, I see 2 very strange 
problems.  1) Network processed that shouldn't even relate to Apache 
don't shut down.  For example, I use PPP to connect to other 
networks, or other networks connect to me with PPP.  However, PPP 
sometimes doesn't shut down when Apache is running.  And yes, it 
doesn't shut down even if they don't connect to Apache.  That is to 
say, we connect to a network, and no body on that network used their 
web browsers to connect to our server.  But the network link still 
sometimes (about 1 in 10) won't shut off properly.  If I reboot the 
system without Apache this problem goes away.  2) My filesystem gets 
corrupted when I run the Apache server.  This happens in serveral 
ways.  For example, a computer tries to write to a drive on my Linux 
box, and I get a kernel panic error.  Then, I can't shutdown that 
process, or any other process.  When I try the sync, or shutdown, or 
halt command, my terminal hangs.  If I switch virtual terminals to 
restart the hung terminal, I get a kernel panic.  Eventually I just 
power off the machine.
	As I said before, this bug is very wierd.  I do know that I've been 
running the same kernel since November of 1996 with none of these 
problems.  I have not changed, or added anything to the system 1 
month before I installed Apache.  And furthermore, I only get this 
problem when I am running the Apache server.  This has been a stable 
network server for many months now.  That is why I believe Apache has 
a bad interaction with something else on my machine.
	I am using Linux 2.0.26 running on an Intel P5-133.  I am using the 
Slackware distribution, although I have upgraded some packages, I do 
not believe I broke anything.  I am using the new Apache 1.2b7.  I 
have not run an earlier version of Apache on our server.  The 
computer has 32 MB of memory, although it uses most of it without 
Apache.  The disk drives are a comination of SCSI and IDE.  However, 
the corruption is not localized to any drive.  Whenever I hard 
reboot, a check is forced and problems are found with several 
unrelated files on most of the hard drives.
	I check the filesystem regularly on the Linux Box and nothing like 
this has ever showed up before I started running Apache.
	I greatly appreciate any help you can give me in fixing this 
problem.  If you need further information about my system 
configurations please ask.  The syslogs don't report more about the 
kernal panic, and I don't have the kernel debug option compiled on 
this machine because it does slow down this network server.

Thanks in advance,

Joe Possert
joseph@voltec.com
joseph@voltec.com

(The linuX Files - The Source is Out There)