Apache crashes

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 8, 2009, at 22:27, Scott Haneda wrote:

> On Oct 8, 2009, at 7:36 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> What OS is this? If 10.5 or later, the user should be "_www" not  
>> "www".
>>
>> Where does "group 70" come from? That should be "_www" too,  
>> shouldn't it?
>
> This is 10.5, PPC
> As to www or _www, I was pretty sure the are synonymous...
> $touch foo
> 	-rw-r--r--  1 me  staff    0 Oct  8 20:06 foo
> $sudo chown www:www foo
> 	-rw-r--r--  1 _www    _www     0 Oct  8 20:06 foo
> $sudo chown _www:_www foo
> 	-rw-r--r--  1 _www    _www     0 Oct  8 20:06 foo
>
> No matter what, they always seem to be _www.
>
> Group 70 is:
> AppleMetaNodeLocation: /Local/Default
> GeneratedUID: ABCDEFAB-CDEF-ABCD-EFAB-CDEF00000046
> Password: *
> PrimaryGroupID: 70
> RealName:
> HTTP Users
> RecordName: _www www
> RecordType: dsRecTypeNative:groups
> SMBSID: S-1-5-21-170
>
> That is built in, I did not make that.  Where is apache deciding to  
> set these values from, and why is it only an intermittent error?   
> The default httpd.conf has:
> User www
> Group www

Apache gets those values from the User and Group lines in the  
httpd.conf, as you pointed out. I don't know why the error you  
experience is intermittent.


> This thread I just found sheds more light on it:
> http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/httpd-users/200810.mbox/%3C5249c07e0810091021s77d4f603y50c3fbb20cd4c181@mail.gmail.com%3E
>
> Google searches on this are pretty strongly pointing to  
> 'initgroups', which I know nothing about.

I see in that thread someone else reports this same problem a years  
ago, but I don't see a solution mentioned. If you are not able to  
resolve the issue, I recommend writing to that list again, referencing  
that old thread, and asking for more information.


> According to this:
> http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1495604
> I should change the httpd.conf file to _www an _www u/g, though  
> Apache should still not crash regardless.  This is not all the time  
> like in the above post, I only get it under a condition I can not  
> repeat currently.

I do see that thread advocates changing "www" to "_www", but as you've  
shown above, they are synonymous, so I don't know why that would make  
a difference. But by all means try it. Nobody else has reported  
problems related to this, that I'm aware of, and the apache2 portfile  
was never changed to put "_www" into the httpd.conf on Leopard, and  
Leopard was introduced years ago, so if there were a problem about  
this, I would have expected to hear about it long before now.


> I have never worked with bug reporting to Apache, do you think this  
> is cofig on my end, or worth taking up the chain?

I do not know. I have not experienced this problem before.