* Greg Ames ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote : > I mentioned this to other Apache folks around here and got some interesting > reactions: > > * If we don't control this with a directive, we might violate the rule of > least astonishment. For example, admins might be living with some buggy > modules, and all of a sudden their disks fill up with unwanted coredump > files. (Of course ServerRoot or CoreDumpDirectory would have to be > writable by the httpd User for that to happen.)
agreed; that really wouldn't be too pleasant! > > * If we do control this with a new directive and we don't make it very > clear that this is just a Linux 2.4+ thing, users might think that turning > on the new directive will magically solve all lack-of-coredump issues. It > won't...there are Linux kernels < 2.4, ulimit -c, permission issues, and > the CoreDumpDirectory directive to name a few things, not to mention > sysadmin stuff you have to do on FreeBSD and Solaris. > > One solution might be to control it with CoreDumpDirectory. If that's in > the config file, one would assume the admin wants coredumps on failures. > Once more, I have to agree - I only have CoreDumpDirectory enabled when I'm actually chasing down problems - I never enable it for production servers. However, we should document very clearly and obviously that setting CoreDumpDirectory will now produce cores even as root; it's entirely possible that some admins don't remove the directive because they *know* that we don't produce cores when running as root. > > I'm also curious about how admins with Linux production sites are dealing > with seg faults etc. today if they are not getting coredumps. > generally i run apache as a different user on a different port but with the exact config I want for >48 hours before taking it live, that usually sorts out any problems one way or another - if I do start seeing segfaults as root then the only usual recourse is firing up gdb and running in single process mode. This patch would be very useful in that respect. +1 from me to have CoreDumpDirectory be able to enable core dumps from root owned processes. Cheers, -Thom > Thanks, > Greg
