Re: Bug: apache/mod_svn intermittently creates transaction dirs with incorrect permissions or ownership such that the transaction breaks.

On Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 01:48:04PM -0400, John Duprey wrote:
> I'm about to file a subversion bug in relation to apache/mod_svn 
> intermittently creating transaction dirs with incorrect permissions or 
> ownership such that the transaction breaks.
> 
> [...]
> Inspection on the server side reveals one of 2 scenarios:
> 
>    2. The props file in the transaction directory (e.g. 
>    /svnroot/repos/reposname/db/transactions/90-1.txn/props) is owned by 
>    the root user and ONLY user has write permissions 

I don't use mod_dav_svn myself (I run over svn://), but as a general
principle, if files are being created that are owned by root, they
_must_ be being created by a process running as root.

In my apache configuration (which is 1.3, but I imagine 2.x on UNIX is
similar), there's a single parent process run as root, and a number of
children running as 'nobody'. The children handle requests, while the
parent binds to port 80 and manages the children.

Could you add something to your monitoring script to capture the whole
process tree every couple of seconds? It's always possible, I suppose,
that one of the apache children is erroneously running as root.

Alternatively, if there is another  process running as root that you've
not been able to find, that might be another way to find it. [Did you
check root's crontab?]

You said you were originally running RHEL3. I assume that this means we
can discount any SELinux interaction?

Regards,
Malcolm