At 12:24 AM 23/02/2005 +0000, you wrote:

>ummm, the platform is a rackspace Athon:
>
>[root@fedora root]# uname -a
>Linux fedora 2.6.5-1.358 #1 Sat May 8 09:04:50 EDT 2004 i686 athlon
>i386 GNU/Linux

What about the Firebird server? Classic? Superserver? both?

>For whatever reason, I think that I fixed things to the point where
>they work OK.
>
>The only major problem is that the system is now crashing.

That doesn't seem very OK to me.

>I told my customer that I've never heard of firebird or interbase doing this.

Which is true. But apparently it's doing it, so there is a first time for
everything.

>Essentially, Apache runs a script which uses the embedded library as
>user apache.

Gulp.

>When I first set up the system, the semaphores were owned by apache
>(since it kicked off fb_lock_mgr) and when root tried to run isql,
>the isql script would hang.
>
>So then I setuid and chmod +s on the fb_lock_mgr program.
>
>That let multiple users access the database but then the system
>started crashing, as mentioned.

You'll help yourself a lot by telling us which server you are using. Do a
rpm -qa | grep Firebird

and report the *exact* name of the installed package. (If it's
FirebirdSS... and it's not the NPTL version then there will be one major
cause of the problem. If there is more than one, then that's another. If
you're also running a version of Apache that isn't NPTL-aware, then that's
another. I can't help with troubleshooting threading problems with Apache.

>When I got home today, I thought about using an inittab boot entry to
>launch fb_lock_mgr so it runs as root and creates semaphores as root.
>
>At this point, I don't know what to think about the crashes.
>
>Does anyone think it's possible for embedded firebird to crash a
>fedora linux server?

If the configuration is screwed, anything can happen. If you (or your
"Apache script" <gulp>) are trying to multi-thread libfbembed.so, then
anything can happen. If you're trying to mix libfbembed.so with
Superserver then anything can happen.

>The system seems to crash in close proximity to when I run isql so I
>was thinking about fb_lock_mgr.

I haven't tried to mismatch fb_lock_manager and server owners but I reckon
it could cause some sparks to fly.

At some point you will have provided enough information about your setup
for *someone* to be able to help...we're not there yet.

./heLen