Re: Help Debugging Windows Server 2003 Win32 + Apache2.2 + mod_perl + Activestate Pelr 5.8.8 ErrorID 26

Q1 : are you running Apache as a Windows Service ?
Q2 : if yes, in the Service properties, is the "allow service to interact with the 
desktop" checkbox checked ?
Q3 : still if yes, under what user-id ? is it "Local System", or another local user, or a 
domain user ?
Q4 : for such an error, there should be some message in the Windows Event Logs.
What does it say there ?


HappyPerlUser wrote:
> Hi I'm trying to debug a persistent error that we've had for a long time, but
> has now become acute.
> 
> We always "use strict" and do extensive testing, but this problem has eluded
> us so far.
> 
> Every now and again (4 or 5 times per day) a process would error with a
> Windows Error 26 generating a Windows Error Reporting Popup on a terminal
> server console. The user data and process looks like it has completed
> without any error at the Perl and DB level: it's only the garbage collection
> that's showing an error.
> 
> In the past this wasn't so bad, as the Apache2 process died and could be
> restarted and no harm was done. Now that the code has been moved from a real
> to a virtual server (which is allegedly identical but clearly isn't) the
> httpd.exe process is hanging awaiting user input to confirm the error popup
> window before terminating.
> 
> We have searched high and low and tried all sorts of registry hacks.
> 
> We've also written more watchdog code to regularly fetch pages from the
> server and if they time out to call taskkill to recycle the process, which
> although it works, isn't ideal.
> 
> Question 1) Does anyone have a reliable way of ignoring this Windows popup
> error and letting the httpd.exe process terminate silently so that our
> standard process watchdog can restart it?
> 
> 
> We have also been looking at the output of a crash dump that we triggered
> manually with MS userdump.exe. We already have symbols files for Apache2,
> other modiles and mod_perl installed. The error is occurring during a string
> copy during the general destructor process of mod_perl after our code has
> successfully completed. 
> 
> Although the Windows error is clearly being triggered by mod_perl, we
> suspect that the root cause lies much deeper and is probably something to do
> with win32::OLE and not being thread safe.
> 
> We can't find any symbols files for perl itself.
> 
> Question 2) Can anyone tell us how to reliably dump trace information at the
> perl level so we can trace precisely which perl program (and hopefully which
> subroutine or method) is triggering the problem?
> 
> Again we've searched high and low for a perl58.pdb and perl.pdb symbol table
> for the Activestate Perl build but we cannot find one anywhere. Would this
> mean we have to recompile our own custom Perl kernel to get this info? If so
> that would be a real pain,as then we would have altered something on the
> core system.
> 
> So can anyone point me at a ready built version of symbol tables
> (perl58.pdb) for Activestate Perl Win32?
> 
> If you have any other constructive tips for how to dig into this further,
> please share.
> 
> Thanks