Re: Strange error message

On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 10:51:47PM +0000, Andreas Kaempf wrote:
> Lately, I'm getting about three e-mails a day a sent from my Apache
> server, with no subject line and with the following message body:
> 
> Subject: SkunkWeb critical error, host soundience.com
> SkunkWeb: error reading stdin from client
> 
> That's it. No more information in the e-mail or logs at the time of the
> messages. 

If you want information in the logs, you can adjust the apache log
level.  But you won't get anything too fascinating.  For some reason,
the read from the client -- that is, apache's client -- is failing.

> I'm running several virtual hosts behind Apache, and the
> message does not indicate which virtual host or page is causing the
> problem. The web sites seem to be working okay on casual inspection, so
> perhaps it's benign.

Admittedly it doesn't log much.  The relevant function in
mod_skunkweb.c is get_stdin(), if you want to muck with it.

> Has anyone encountered this? Any suggestions on how to track down or
> correct the errors?

I've see it occasionally when there is networking problem that is
causing client connections to fail.  For instance, some users were
behind a misconfigured firewall that tended to cut off off file
uploads; when they tried to upload, their browser would hang and I'd
get one of these messages.

Maybe someone else with a better grip on network issues or life in
general will see more to it, but my impression is that if the read
fails it probably isn't apache's or skunkweb's problem.

j

-- 
Jacob Smullyan


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