segfault with rlm_perl

[Johan Meiring]

On 2011/01/04 09:59 PM, Anatoly Ivanov wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am running freeradius (2.1.8) with rlm_perl (5.10.1, USE_ITHREADS) on a
> Debian-Lenny system.
>
> The problem is radius fails with segfault – periodically and intermittently.
> I have no way to reliably reproduce the problem – it happens only in
> production, and it is impossible to reliably predict when or backtrace why.
>
> It seems that I am running into some kind of memory allocation error.
>
> Coredump type #3 (see below) is the most "popular" one; coredumps with
> backtrace going into perl seem to be rather random (it fails in different
> parts of libperl.so) - again, see below.
>
>
> I understand that freeradius has a newer version available - but I am
> hesitant to upgrade a production server without a very good reason. And I
> could not find such reason for an upgrade after reading the CHANGELOG for
> 2.1.10. But maybe I am wrong?
>
> Any ideas?
>
>

A complete gut feel after reading this says you have a hardware problem - 
faulty ram.

Has this happened from the beginning or suddenly now?

You can try memtesting (http://www.memtest.org/) the server, or a trick that 
I've found works sometimes (if you can't take the server out of production) 
to show a ram problem, is to compile a kernel.  I've seen compilation fail 
at different stages with faulty RAM.

I realiuse the advice might sound ridiculous, but it has worked for me before.

-- 


Johan Meiring
Cape PC Services CC
Tel: (021) 883-8271
Fax: (021) 886-7782