[Nottingham] NLUG Desktop Fix-it Evening - my writeup

[Martin Garton]

On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 10:39 +0100, Michael Erskine wrote:
> NLUG Desktop Fix-it Evening

Great write up, Michael.

> our
> impromptu LAN came to the rescue here and this uncovered an
> issue with the Apache install on Martin G's laptop. More
> experts were on hand (inc. Michael of TuxGames) to examine
> the Apache install

Thanks to Michael S. for spotting the first problem, but the second and
stranger problem we observed remains.

Since this is a rawhide machine, I'm tempted to wait until a few days of
updates have gone in in case there's some known brokenness.  After that
(and after having a closer look at the network with ethereal), I'll
almost be at the point of raising a bug somewhere.

For anyone interested, the symptoms we were observing were that apache
was running and able to serve up some files without problems.  However,
a few files I had in my homedir and had exposed using UserDir could not
be downloaded. It would just hang.  "/home/martin/public_html/test.html"
was fine, but a couple of tar.gz files in there just caused things to
hang.  Apache forked off another httpd so it was definitely receiving
something, but logged nothing (even on debug log level) and the tcp send
queue from the client got quite large.  It's as if the server accepted
the connection on the socket and then didn't read from it.

If I get chance later, I'll be having a look with ethereal and strace.

-- 
Martin.