Failures with solutions

This page lists a set of failures that I have encountered on one of my system along with a solution. This page is mostly Gentoo related.

I’ve just upgraded Apache to 2.0.55 (with apr-0.9.7 and apr-util-0.9.7) and realised, that subversion through WebDAV is no longer working. I got the following error:

• Could not open the requested SVN filesystem. This error was reported when I tried to access the repository from the webpage.
• svn: PROPFIND request failed on /path/to/repos. This error was reported when I tried to access the repository from the command line.

The solution was to delete the repository and to re-create it. The following procedure can be used to do this in a safe manner.

$ cp -r /path/to/repository/conf /a/safe/directory
$ svnadmin dump /path/to/repository > ~/repository.dump
$ rm -r /path/to/repository
$ mkdir /path/to/repository
$ svnadmin create /path/to/repository
$ cat ~/repository.dump | svnadmin load /path/to/repository
$ cp -r /a/safe/directory/conf /path/to/repository
$ chmod -R apache:apache /path/to/repository

The last step is to ensure the permissions on the repository. Since my repository is accesses by the apache user, I set the permissions accordingly.

After that, everything started to work again

I usually use the (at the moment) new gcc version 4.1 compiler. This does not produce correct code in all situations. Here a few programs that only work with either gcc 4.* or with gcc 3.*.

On one of my servers, I use the peruser multiplexer for Apache. I recently installed Apache in version 2.0.58 with the latest peruser MPM (version 0.2) and had the following error in the Apache log after restarting:

child pid —— exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

It turned out that it wasn’t a problem of the peruser MPM, but a problem with the compiler. It looks like gcc 3.4.* produces wrong code for x86_64 architectures. Thus, I re-compiled Apache with gcc version 4.*, and it started to work again...

The ucspi-tcp package, of which I use tcpserver to start bincimap, cannot be compiled with compiler optimizations. I usually use

-O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer

This gives an error in my bincimap log that looks like

tcpserver: fatal: temporarily unable to figure out IP address for 0.0.0.0: file does not exist

Compile it with

-march=k8 -pipe

and the error should disappear.

It seems that another solution is even simpler and works as well:

$ touch /etc/dnsrewrite