Re: httpd not running after reboot

["Robert M. Riches Jr." <richesr1 inetarena com>]

> From: Mark Arrasmith <arrasmith@math.twsu.edu>
> Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 17:05:21 -0600
>
> First off . . . Thanks for the Video card suggestions.  I've ordered an ATI 
> Radeon PCI.  I'll let you know how it runs.  Onto my new problem.
>
> I have an old AS/200 running RedHat 7.1 as an apache, MySQL, and PHP server.  
> After reboot I can't get apache to start.  I keep getting errors like . . .
>
> alpha_fp_emul: Invalid FP insn 0x4f938 at 0x2000110dc78
>
> in messages.  But, if I start up XFree, apache will then start running.  
> Though it does have lots of . . . 
>
> httpd: unaligned trap at 000002000003a468: 47e0041847eb0c42 28 2
>
> errors in the messages log.  Any ideas?  I seem to remember someone talking 
> about seeding the random number generator and getting XFree to load quickly, 
> which might have something to do with this.  I couldn't find it in the 
> archives, and I might just be on crack.

Seeding the random number generator sounds like something I had
to do to get an X server to start up in a reasonable time.  One
option to fill the entropy pool (input to the random number
generator) is to chatter on the keyboard or move the mouse around
a bunch.  Another option is to invoke startx in background, then
cause a bunch of disk I/O.  In my case, I cat files from /usr/bin
to /dev/null until I see /tmp/.X11-unix/X$dispnum in existence.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem this is likely to have anything to
do with the problem described above with FP emulation and apache.

Good luck.

Robert Riches
richesr1@inetarena.com

(I'm looking forward to reading the Linux Journal article on what
to do to/with/for spammers like the ones who lurk on mailing lists
to find addresses.)