Issues with Apache?

[rusty0101]

I'm running into a bit of a problem with the apache2 server under Mythbuntu. Since I run the same server (I think) under my ubuntu server platform, I think the issue is not specific to the server, but may be related to a configuration issue under Mythbuntu.

I built a dual core platform to run Mythbuntu on and after a recent apt-get update/upgrade cycle, discovered I could no longer see my Mythtweb server from various locations. Any time I log into the server and try kicking off the apache2 server, my system seems to vanish. To try to diagnose the situation, I launched 'top' in one ssh session and in another ssh session I started apache2. The top portion of top gives me:


top - 20:54:17 up 1:36, 3 users, load average: 488.33, 911.75, 33.46
Tasks: 27511 total, 2 running, 27509 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 1.2%us, 85.4%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.2%id, 13.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2067504k total, 2018336k used, 49168k free, 668k buffers
Swap: 2000084k total, 2000084k used, 0k free, 1784k cached


Needless to say the system seems a bit sluggish.

I sorted the output of top by pid, (higher pids will be at the top) and I see:


PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
32767 root 17 0 4384 168 4 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 apport
32766 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
32765 root 18 0 4388 168 4 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 apport
32764 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper


with the aport and khelper processes filling the rest of the listing. And yes, 'ps -ef' presents a screen filled with stuff like:

root 9566 9565 0 20:36 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/python /usr/share/appor
root 9567 11 0 20:36 ? 00:00:00 [khelper]
root 9568 9567 0 20:36 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/python /usr/share/appor
root 9569 11 0 20:36 ? 00:00:00 [khelper]


Eventually I start seeing messages about no resources available to fork if I try to run a command in a shell.

It looks like either /etc/init.d/apache2 or one of the other apps associated with apache is fork bombing my system. Based upon the output of ps, I'm thinking that the problem is in either /usr/share/apport, or a configuration file for apache.

If the load average at the top of the output of top is confusing, I think it should be. The fact that I got any response at all, including a display out of top, with load averages in any of the timeframes that are in excess of 900 is impressive to me, much less a load that high.

Looking for help on what I should be looking for in that file to fix this.

Thank you.

-Rusty :confused:

[rusty0101]

After a bit of digging, it appears that apport is a collection of tools for collecting information about applications that have crashed. Now I need to determine what app is crashing causing what looks like a fork bomb. I have done a re-install on php5-common, and apport, as they are apps that had 'crash' reports in /var/crash/, and have tried to do similarly for a few other packages, but I keep running into crashes like this.

[rusty0101]

Well, it looks like the problem is not restricted to appache and related tools. I get similar results when I try to run the mythbuntu configuration tools from the setup screen. I would love to just go in and do a re-download all packages and remove-reinstall all of them on the off chance that when I had some bad memory in the system a package updated and was corrupted. At the moment none of the tv-tuner cards in the system are working, and so on. I can watch tv, so long as it's through an external hdhomerun tuner, or I can watch previously recorded programming, but nothing new gets recorded.

Would really like to see a revert function for packages, but I'm not sure that would work here. Looks like I'll have to reinstall from scratch and loose all the recordings I already have.

Kind of wondering where the instructions are for Mythbuntu Hardy Herron are, as they have already releasd alpha 3 of the Ubuntu release, and I know that alpha 2 recognized my network interface on the motherboard. (Would like to pull the usb-ethernet adapter...)

[faginbagin]

Hi Rusty,

While I can't help you figure out what's crashing, I have gone through a couple of O/S reinstalls involving mythtv. As long as your recordings are on a different partition than root, and you don't touch it when you reinstall the O/S and mysql isn't crashing, you should be able to backup and restore your recording data. See:
http://mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-23.html
This chapter has two sections of interest:
23.5 "Saving or restoring the database"
23.7 "Moving your data to new hardware"
I've followed 23.7 when reinstalling and when I didn't trust the configurations I had done in the past, but did trust my recording data.

HTH

[rusty0101]

Yep, that allowed me to restore my video content. It's a wait and see project now to see if the re-installation of Mythbuntu fixes the issue's I've had.