You say "keeps shutting down". Do you mean it always crashes when
you try to run it? Or that sometimes it works, for a while?
If it always crashes, I'd try running "id" with the user that
httpd is configured to run as. E.g.
id poirier
and make sure it shows that that user is a member of the group that
httpd is configured to run as. I suggest confirming this by running
"id" because Mac OS X doesn't necessarily use /etc/passwd and /etc/group
to store that information, and maybe those files look right but Mac OS X
is confused.
If it crashes now and then, I wonder why it's even running that code
after startup. If it's starting and stopping child processes regularly,
maybe you could tweak your MPM settings so it starts the servers it
needs at startup and just keeps them running.
Thanks for replying Dan. To answer your question, it works all of the time for a few hours and then crashes randomly anywhere between a few hours to a few days later. The user/group combination that I am using in Apache was in fact put together using Mac OS X's directory services utilities (since /etc/group is not used) and therefore, when I do an `id <user>` call, one of the groups that is returned happens to be the group I am assigning in Apache, which falls in line with the expected behavior.
I will try out your suggestion for tweaking MPM settings though it seems as that may simply delay the inevitable.
As for the user needing to be root to fall through to that part of the code, perhaps I should try starting up apache as a regular user (i.e. apachectl start instead of sudo apachectl start). The only reason I currently use sudo is that Mac OS X seems to require super user access to bind to a privileged port. I may be able to get around this by using launchd to start it up and changing ownership of some of the directories. Is this something that would be worthwhile to try?
Thanks again,
-AS
