[LON-CAPA-admin] Mystery of the disapperaing httpd-- SOLVED!

[Guy Albertelli II]

Hi All,

Finally discovered the mystery of the disappearing httpd.

It is a bug in some versions of the CPAN module Date::Manip that
occurs because of an interaction between Fedora's 'prelink' script and
perl's initalization rutines

I know that Date::Manip 5.42a is bad, and I know that Date::Manip 5.44
is _good_.

You ca discover what version you have by doing

rpm -q -a perl-DateManip

Fedora 3 has version perl-DateManip-5.42a-3
Fedora 4 has version perl-DateManip-5.42a-4

SuSE 9.3 has version perl-DateManip-5.42a-127
(but is currently unaffected as it doesn't use 'prelink')


(Fedora 2, Fedora 5, RHEL 4, and SLES 9, are all good as they 
have Date::Manip 5.44)


We will be packaging up a new version of this soon for the Fedora's,
and SuSE but to stop things from breaking in the mean time:


You need to first locate your copy of Manip.pm

This is most likely in (Fedora 3/4):

/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.6/Date/Manip.pm


If it isn't you can find it by doing:
rpm -q -l perl-DateManip | grep Manip.pm

or

find /usr/lib/perl5/ | grep Manip.pm


Once found, look for these lines (should be lines 34-35):

---------------
# Determine if we're doing taint checking
$Date::Manip::NoTaint = eval { local $^W; unlink "$^X$^T"; 1 };
---------------


The part which is screwing things up is that 'unlink'.

Please replace this block of code with:

---------------
# Determine if we're doing taint checking
$Date::Manip::NoTaint = eval { local $^W=0; eval("#" . substr($^X, 0, 0)); 1 };
---------------

You don't need to restart anything at this point in time.

If anything goes awry, please contact me immeadiately. (I've tested
this in our cluster and all looks good.)

-- 
guy at albertelli.com   0-7-1-8-27,137