[Pdx-pm] Strange Random coredumps

[Joshua Keroes]

On (Thu, Dec 19 12:35), Mark Hartley wrote:
> I am having a very frustrating problem with a few Perl apps
> I've written randomly dumping core, and I'm hoping someone can
> point me in a direction to find the cause.
> 
> A little background as to what I'm doing:
> I have a whole bunch of applications that I've written which run
> as a CGI under Apache (1.3.26) on a FreeBSD (4.6.2-RELEASE-p4) machine.
> There are actually 3 of these machines, one of which is running SSL.
> All 3 machines are using Perl 5.005_03.
> 
> The applications are talking to a MS SQL server 2000 database (not by
> my choice).  I am using DBI:Sybase drivers to talk to the db.  I know
> that I could use ODBC drivers as well, but right now I'm using the
> Sybase ones.

What version of Perl, what DBI version, what DBD::Sybase version?
Are the coredumps written to user apache's home directory (or
somewhere else?

You're going to want a coredump for these. Since the Perl debugger
isn't helping, this is most likely the only way to tell where the
culprit really is.

If you can't find a coredump, change your CGI/apache user's shell
options to allow coredumps, make it break again, open the core file with
gdb and get a backtrace (bt). You may have to recompile perl or the
DVD::Sybase module with -g (-DDEBUGGING) to get a useful backtrace.

-Joshua

PS I Am Not a C Programmer