Topic: Apache suddenly down - php error loading mod_php4.so

[Mahmood Al-Yousif]

Hi All,

All of a sudden my apache server is refusing to start as it reports

  Syntax error on line 109 of /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:
  Cannot load /usr/lib/apache/libphp4.so into server: shared
     object not open.

The server was working okay for days without touching it serving several domains wonderfully, php was working fine, I didn't touch any configs etc, but suddenly it refused to load! I have no idea where to start or what to do other than reformatting, re-installing and wasting most of the day reconfiguring and reloading my data.

I cannot access the e-smith-manager interface at all...

Any help or pointers would be really appreciated.

regards
Mahmood

[guestFF]

Hi Mahmood,

Did you 'cleanly' reboot your system or did you had a crash?

RequestedDeletion

[guestFF]

ps.

If you didn't change any config files by hand, and used the template-custome mechanism then try giving the command:

'/sbin/e-smith/signal-event post-upgrade'

This will regenerate the original config files. Maybe myPHP changed something to the conf file??

Good luck

RequestedDeletion

[Mahmood Al-Yousif]

Thanx for the suggestion Wang. Did what you suggested but no good.

It seems that the PHP installation (at least the file mod_php4.so) got corrupted for some reason and it was a clean boot I did on the server (as far as I am aware, the power didn't go off all of a sudden on it either) but we do have a dog that might have pressed the button when no one was around!!

What I started doing now is downloading and re-installing PHP and it seems to give me some hope that the server could be restored without having to re-install the whole thing.

At the moment (after installing a couple of PHP rpm's) it's giving me a mysql connection error. So we're on the right path.

There is reference here somewhere of PHP 4.0.5 rpm's which I'll search for an install instead of the 4.0.3.

I'll let you know how it goes.

regards
Mahmood

[Mahmood Al-Yousif]

Well I gave up.. reformatted and restored now all is okay. But it shouldn't be like this... I'm surprised that the community didn't offer more help.

Guess everyone is busy with their own problems...

[Dan Brown]

Well, you really didn't give the community much time to help you, particularly on a Sunday morning.  The PHP RPMs (in particular, mod_php) would seem like the obvious culprit--you could have checked that by doing rpm -V mod_php.  The next step might have been to re-install the PHP RPMs anyway (you'd use the rpm -i --force options to do this, otherwise it won't reinstall something that it thinks is already installed).

I guess it's moot now, though, since you've already given up and reinstalled.

[Mahmood Al-Yousif]

I keep forgetting that not the whole world have their weekend on Thursday/Friday like us!! Sorry, in my haste I didn't take account of the weekend.

Thanx for your suggestion Dan, before giving up and reformatting, I did download the 4.0.5 RPM's from a site that's mentioned on this board and installed all that needed to be installed to no avail.

As I did have complete backups of the data, I didn't think it was worth trying more permutations and ripping what's left of my hair, so I just reformatted. Agreed, it would have been better to find the root cause of the problem and share that so no one else falls into the trap, but I really didn't have time as the sites I serve from e-smith were down for about 2 days and people started calling! (just local completely amateurish sites which you can vew at bahraini.tv if interested).

On hindsight, I really needed to install imagemagick and freetype so that thumbnails of images I have on the site are generated automagically. I remember when I did the install it did give me dependancy errors which I ignored (did the rpm -ivh --nodeps) while I am not sure that is the problem, it might have contributed to it... still, I'm almost that much of an expert in linux to decide what actually went wrong. It could also be any number of things I did to e-smith, but to its credit, it keeps on going and going and going like that rabbit on tv!!

Thanx again for your help and concern, I apologize if I offended anyone.

regards
Mahmood