How do I get a backtrace, to help find the reason for my core dump?
Following are the steps you will need to complete, to get a backtrace: • Make sure you have debugging symbols available, at least in Apache. On platforms where you use GCC/GDB, you will have to build Apache+mod_ssl with “OPTIM=”-g -ggdb3″” to get this. On other platforms at least “OPTIM=”-g”” is needed. • Start the server and try to reproduce the core-dump. For this you may want to use a directive like “CoreDumpDirectory /tmp” to make sure that the core-dump file can be written. This should result in a /tmp/core or /tmp/httpd.core file. If you don’t get one of these, try running your server under a non-root UID. Many modern kernels do not allow a process to dump core after it has done a setuid() (unless it does an exec()) for security reasons (there can be privileged information left over in memory). If necessary, you can run /path/to/httpd -X manually to force Apache to not fork. • Analyze the core-dump. For this, run gdb /path/to/httpd /tmp/httpd.core or a similar command. In G
