Ok, so I have definitely confirmed that: 1) Both the db and www chroot periodically break 2) When broken, the www chroot can't send email from PHP 3) Each can be fixed by chrooting in with "ls /etc/group /etc/passwd" 4) Fixing one doesn't fix the other 5) Once the www chroot is fixed, PHP can send email just fine 6) I needn't restart lighttpd/php to fix it The filesystem is ext3.One theory was nscd, but I don't think I have that running. At the very least, I don't see a nscd process:
[root@XXXX svn]# ps aux | grep nscd root 12260 0.0 0.1 3916 684 pts/0 S+ 00:01 0:00 grep nscd [root@XXXX svn]#I'm thinking the real solution is to ditch this old FC4 host system (which was installed by the dedicated server provider, and thus I don't know what weird changes they made) and switch to Debian.
-david Daniel Burrows wrote:
On Wed, Jul 02, 2008 at 05:38:50PM -0700, David Barrett <dbarrett@quinthar.com> was heard to say:Wow, great observation: doing a "ls" of /etc/group and /etc/passwd fixes it. How incredibly strange:I'd go for "jawdroppingly bizarre" myself. The only other thing I can think of is that maybe there's something odd at the filesystem level. Is it anything but a straight ext3 filesystem? (e.g., are you using NFS, unionfs, fuse filesystems, etc) Daniel